Get a FREE fully-working copy of Steganos Security Suite 7 (worth £49.99) when you sign up to the Practical PC Newsletter. It's all in the planning - Part 5
Producing a new site is exciting, exhilarating and fun. Keeping it updated, though, is a different matter
If you've followed this series from its inception, you should, by now, have a Web site to be proud of. It will be well designed, easily readable, and have a navigation structure that makes it a joy to move around in for your readers.
Your 'voice' will be established, your style sorted, and you'll be looking at search engine placement (which is a topic for another time). By now, the exciting work is finished, and the hard work begins - you've got to keep the site fresh!
Regular
Unless your site is a definite one-off - a repository for information that is unchanging, a reference point - you've now got to decide on an update schedule. Once you've done that, you've got to stick to it!
That doesn't mean that, every Friday, you upload some new pages. Well, not necessarily, at any rate. However, if you have decided that a weekly update is going to happen, then it's best to decide on a window in which the update will take place. You can define it narrowly, if you like - for instance, Practical PC is updated every weekday, and the actual placement of the pages happens at around 4:30pm every day, ready for 6pm when usage increases.
Alternatively, you can define a wider window - every weekend is popular, or 'in the first half of the week'. Whichever way you go, though, try your hardest to stick to it. Your visitors are likely to become regulars if they know that there's going to be something new for them to read at set intervals. That's why we flag exactly how often we update here on PPC - so you, the reader, know that you can come back here every day and have something new to read.
You may, on the other hand, like to visit once a week, perhaps at the weekend, and know that there'll be ten new articles for you to read. Whichever way you like to visit here, you know exactly what to expect.
The same sort of idea needs to apply to your website - and it's as well to let your visitors know what your schedule is. In the case of www.strange-brew.com (a site I maintain) the update schedule is very loose. The site gets updated when there's new information to put up there. However, I make a point of trying very hard to get something new on the site every week, and it tends to happen on a Wednesday night, which usually when gigs are confirmed, so I can update the gig guide, and perhaps add a new track to the playlist.
Newsletters
That all happens because the Strange Brew site is informational - it exists for the sole purpose of letting people know what the band is up to. It has nothing to sell actually on the site, not even the services of the band - it is not, in other words, and e-commerce site. Now, there are dozens of email newsletters going about that purport to tell you everything you need to know about your site, but they all seem to have one thing in common - they're aimed at folks that are trying to sell things from their site - e-commerce sites, in a phrase.
So, a lot of the things these newsletters suggest you do are, strictly speaking, not relevant to the majority of Home Page Webmasters. For instance, although you want traffic - there's little point in creating a website if no-one ever visits - your livelihood is not likely to suffer if you don't get any.
Likewise, considering that this series is aimed pretty much at folks maintaining their Web site on their ISP's shared webspace, you have no need to worry about exceeding bandwidth limits, so if you get a million visitors per day, that's fine too!
Whether it's worth subscribing to one of the site-building newsletters, then, is open to debate. I find one or two quite useful, as they let me see what some of the newer technologies are. I tend to gloss over the all-out sales pitches for search-engine placement companies, and the sometimes very heavy advice on attracting the most advertising for your site/own newsletter.
Indeed, I tend to view the Internet as a research source. In my private capacity, I'm more interested in using my Web space to provide information rather than making money from it. I've discovered that a lot of the so-called Wed-site gurus are really in it to make money themselves. They're not sharing their information freely, but are doing it with an eye to making money. And in order to do that, they're assuming that you're doing the same! Subscribe with care...
