Regular maintenance on your company trucks is a necessity, and you probably inspect your restroom units for wear and tear regularly, too. Hopefully you get a checkup once in awhile yourself, and do some maintenance work on the old body to keep it running smoothly.
But what about the health of your company Web site? When’s the last time it had a checkup? Schedule regular appointments to assess the health of your Web site, otherwise it could crash, die a slow death or, at the very least, spread headaches to visitors.
WEB SITE CALISTHENTICS
Put your company Web site through its paces to see how smoothly it is operating and how up-to-date it is. The following tests won’t take much time, but could reveal problems you weren’t aware of:
1. Visit the site using several different Web browsers. Some of the most popular browsers are Internet Explorer, Safari, Firefox and Opera. Check loading speed and appearance. Your site will probably look and act slightly different on each browser.
2. Have someone who’s new to the Internet or just not very tech-savvy try to navigate the site. This is to ensure that it is as intuitive as possible for people to move around. After a few seconds, ask them to tell you the main message of the home page. Have them find your business location, phone number and e-mail address. If this contact information is a challenge for them to find, the site might benefit from some simplifying.
3. Test any forms on the site. Fill one out yourself and send it. Make sure it gets to the right place in a timely manner.
4. Check all links. Look for broken links or technical problems with the linked sites, such as slow loading.
5. Search for yourself. Use Google, Yahoo! and a few other popular search engines, and search key words for your business to see if the site comes up and how far down the list it is.
6. Check competitors’ sites. See how they compare as far as appearance, information provided, loading speed, etc. Also, note if they are running any promotions or special pricing for customers who utilize their Web site.
7. Look for thieves. Also use Google or Yahoo! to search random phrases from your copy to see if anyone is using your content without permission.
8. Search your company name. This way you can see if anyone has posted good or bad reviews of your company anywhere on the Internet.
9. Type in your Web address without the “www.” It seems like the ultimate in lazy, but a lot of people refuse to type those three letters anymore. If your site doesn’t come up without them, contact your hosting company and see if they can fix the problem.
GET THE MOST FROM YOUR HOST
Speaking of your hosting company, you should be getting regular updates from them on site traffic. Check it over carefully. See if there are peaks and valleys in traffic on your site and try to figure out what might be causing them. Maybe they are seasonal — since you are in a seasonal business — or maybe site traffic jumps when you run an ad or send out an e-mail blast. Also, check the amount of time visitors spent on the site and which pages they lingered the most on.
The hosting company report should also indicate how people are finding your site. What search engines are visitors using and what sites are they coming from? Notice which key words are pulling well for you and try to find ways to add more of those words to your site. This is called search engine optimization, or SEO, in the Web world.
The hosting company might even be able to tell you your “conversion” rate; that is, how many of the people who look at your site actually contact you.
If your hosting company is not providing you with any of this information, or seems reluctant to help you with any problems you notice with loading speed, etc., maybe it’s time to pull up stakes and find a new company to host your site.
THE LATEST AND GREATEST
Make sure everything on your site is up-to-date. A coupon that expired six months ago will only infuriate potential customers. If all the photos on the site are from events five years ago or more, it looks like the company hasn’t done anything of significance since. Keep your site fresh. Not only will it please visitors, but making changes to a site usually gives it a boost on the search engine rankings.
Finally, have a fresh pair of eyes read every word on your site. You may find there’s been a typo somewhere the whole time the site has been up. Fix it and move forward.
