Websites are a great tool for those of us in small business. They allow us to attract visitors from all over, communicate important info in a way easily accessible to our customers, they allow us to showcase our products, and much more. A web site really is an integral part of your small business strategy. There are a number of mistakes that people make when putting together a site for their small business. Here we’re going to look at a few of them, and what we can do to easily fix the problem.
PART III: OUT OF DATE
We are all very busy people, and it can be difficult to keep track of small details, but few things are going to say to visitors on your site that you are asleep at the wheel more than ads for events that have already happened, or promotions that have already ended. Often times this is the kinds of content that we would feature in the page’s slider. It’s great because it allows us to call attention to content in a way that it gets your attention, but the flip side of that is that it becomes quite a glaring error if it’s out of date.
There are several popular sliders available for websites these days. Some of them (Revolution Slider is a great example) have built in features that allow you to set dates for a slider item, allowing you to automatically remove items from the slider as the dates pass. Alternately, we need to put some reminders in our calendar to make those changes manually.
Many sites will automatically feature the most recent content on their homepage. This is great, but if there is no new content, it becomes pretty obvious. If you are not a prolific poster, you may find it helpful to hide the dates on your posts (this is an option in your settings) so that someone looking at your page can’t easily tell that you’ve not posted anything in weeks. That said, it is a good discipline to get into to carve a time out of your schedule for content creation. If you don’t make time, you won’t make content, so plan to spend some time on this on a regular basis, or get someone to do it for you.
One other detail, albeit a small one, is the copyright on the bottom of the page. It’s no big deal if your copyright isn’t updated as soon as the ball drops, but please make sure that you update the year when you get back from the holiday.