Managing your website

The fact that many websites fail to deliver on their initial promise is well documented. Often this failure can be attributed to a decrease in effort or quality once the excitement of getting a site up and running has gone.

This guide looks at the practical implications of running your website after its completion. It provides business owners with hints and tips on how to fulfil your business’s online objectives.

What needs to be done to maintain your site?

If you don’t specifically make someone responsible for your site then you run the risk of failing to maintain it adequately and jeopardise your chances of reaching your online objectives.

Even if you are employing a third party to look after some, or all, of your maintenance requirements, you need to be very specific about just what your contract includes and mutually agree measurable and realistic targets.

The smaller your company (and your budget) the more those with site responsibilities may need to become a jack of all trades, but this means you need to be even more careful about allocating responsibilities.

Ask yourself the following questions:

Content

Who will provide my new site content and ensure my current content is kept up to date? How often will site updates occur and how will I measure the quality of the work produced? Will content for any new sections be the responsibility of the same person? At what point will I have to consider additional resources?

Technical

Although these are the most likely tasks to be handled outside the business, it is vital someone has responsibility for the smooth delivery of the site to your visitors. What happens if my site goes down? Do I have 24-hour cover? What happens if I want to upgrade my services? How often will I receive traffic analysis (details of how many people have visited the site and what they looked at)? How will I be kept informed of technical innovations that can improve my site?

Design

Who will incorporate new material into my site and maintain its current identity? Will new sections be designed in a similar style and will this work need to be carried out by the original designer? Who will keep abreast of recent findings on web design to recommend changes? How often will I review the overall design of my site? What are the cost implications?

Marketing

Who will be responsible for ensuring I maximise my Web potential by attracting site visitors? What funds/resources will be available to them? Will they take responsibility for creating partnerships with other companies for mutual benefit (e.g. to exchange links or suggest affiliate programmes)? How will I integrate my offline and online promotions?

Strategic

Who will review my site objectives, set my goals and review my performance against these criteria? Who will ensure that my future online strategy complements my overall plans for the business?

In addition to these responsibilities, you may also need to consider the areas of advertising, sales, stock levels, fulfilment and delivery deadlines, legal issues and security. Also, domain names (Web addresses) need to be re-registered on a rolling basis – usually every two years.

Who will do it?

Taking on site responsibilities may mean asking people to acquire new skills, expanding your team to obtain new skills, or relying more on a third party than you have done before. You should therefore carry out a website skills audit.

Content

Your content provider/manager should be able to produce high-quality material that your site visitors want to look at and use. You should agree targets for the volume of work expected within a certain timeframe. If external contributors also provide material, then your content manager must be able to commission, edit and proof read their copy.

Technical

The person/company with technical responsibility for your site must be able to ensure that any problems with your site are quickly remedied. Don’t let your own technological ignorance or worries stop you from discussing your expectations for your site. If you don’t know what these should be, ask around so that you can devise some minimum service requirements.

Design

You should remain as happy with the appearance of your site as you were when you first launched it. Your designer should be sufficiently abreast of site design to ensure your Web presence benefits from any significant style changes that could modernise your site.

Marketing

Effective site marketing requires the skills of a strong communicator as it is very often about building relationships with other site owners or industry organisations. Innovative site marketing often stems from tiny budgets, so put a creative thinker to work on your promotional plans.

Strategy

Does the individual with strategic responsibility for the site have a sound understanding of both your overall business and the potential of the Internet within your industry? Does this person have the authority and vision to suggest radical change should it be required?

Why is updating the site important and how do I manage it?

As the key way to drive repeat traffic to your site is to constantly add new content and keep the information that is there relevant and accurate, then site updates will play a major role in the ongoing management of your website. Generally speaking, the more often you can update your site, the better.

Set realistic and achievable timescales for your updates and stick to them. If you find that you can’t adhere to your own timetable, then you either need to reconsider your updating resources or set yourself new and more realistic goals. Don’t simply continue to miss deadlines as this will quickly become the norm and the time between your targeted and actual completion of the work will increase.

If a third party does your updating, then you must check that they are meeting your mutually pre-agreed targets. Again, you must not ignore any failures to deliver updates on time. It will engender a belief that you either haven’t noticed or don’t care, and this could send your site updates further down a priority list.

Prioritising your updates

Different types of information will need updating at different intervals. It is vital that some categories of information should be amended or changed as soon (or as regularly) as possible. These include:

News – Nothing more clearly shows that a site is being overlooked than out-of-date news. If your site has a news section, make sure it is kept up to date.
Prices – If you’re trading online or simply allowing your wares to be viewed, then you are legally obliged to make sure your prices are accurate. Some sites choose to omit costs from their product range so they don’t have to update their prices, but if your goods (or something similar) are available elsewhere you could easily lose a sale by not providing vital information.
Changes to your terms and conditions – You are required by law to ensure that they are accurately displayed.
Product availability and delivery deadlines – If these are wrong you may make a first sale but you’ll never get a second.
Contact details – These should be altered as soon as any changes occur. Any users who finds that your company or a specific named contact cannot be reached will not be filled with confidence.

How can I record who visits my site?

Your ISP (or whoever hosts your site) will have access to your Web logs, which contain vital information about your site visitors. Many ISPs will analyse this information free of charge (or include the cost as part of a payment package). Users visiting your site are usually referred to generically as ‘traffic’. There is lots of other jargon used about the kinds of activity going on on your site related to the measurement and analysis of such traffic, such as:

Page Impressions – The number of total pages viewed on your site over a given period of time. Although a relatively crude measure, it does give a clear indication of your traffic volume.
Unique Users – The number of visitors to your site over a given period of time. This allows you to see just how many people have browsed your site.
Average visit length – There may not be many visitors, and they may not look at many pages, but if they stay on the site for some time then you’re getting something right.
Most popular pages – So what do your site visitors really want? This can be very different to what you may have predicted and to what your visitors claimed they wanted from your site.
Least popular pages – The candidates for removal if space is tight.
Top entry and exit page – Remember that visitors arriving from search engines won’t necessarily arrive via your homepage. The entry pages can tell you what people were searching for when they were directed to your site. A popular exit page could mean visitors start to lose interest, but it could also mean they experience delay. Does this page take a long time to download?
Most popular paths – How do people get through your site? Does your current structure help or hinder this process?
Most downloaded files – Can you provide more like these?
Most submitted forms – What is really cutting down your administrative costs?
International access – How much of your traffic is coming from overseas and are you catering properly for these visitors? If you are trading online, then there are legal implications. Do your terms and conditions conflict with the laws of other jurisdictions? You may need to regulate access to your site, or run site disclaimers, which reduce the risk of legal liability by defining your intended audience.

Your traffic analysis should be viewed alongside your site objectives, so as to provide clear evidence of success or failure to reach your goals. If you haven’t been successful, you may at least be able to identify possible reasons for this and set about rectifying them. You shouldn’t be surprised if your first analysis of your site visitor activity causes some fairly drastic changes to your initial objectives. It may lead you to question the true role of your site, rather than the one you had assumed it would play.

What about customer feedback?

Customer feedback in the online world is as vital as in your traditional business channels, but your website has some significant advantages in collecting it. The interactive nature of the Internet, and the fact that you can gain immediate access to your feedback, make your website the perfect environment for analysing your customers and improving your relationship with them. Ways of encouraging customer feedback include:

Putting an email facility on your site – If your customers use your site to email enquiries directly to you, then you can consider keeping in regular contact with them via email, to update them on your product or company news. Prompt response, particularly to an initial enquiry, is vital to encourage this new method of customer contact.
Online questionnaires – Get responses directly from your customers in real time. The easier you make the form to fill in, the better your response will be. This is a highly cost-effective way to gain market research.
Online polls – If you want to know the answer to what your customers think of a specific issue, ask them directly in a poll on your site. If you let respondents view how other people have voted, you’ll improve your response.
Web forums – Let your customers chat to each other, and you, online. It’s a great way of finding out more about them and their attitudes towards your products/services. It is, however, vital that you police (and if necessary censor) what is being put up on your site to avoid possible litigation.
Provide product reviews – There can be no better way of encouraging other visitors to buy your goods than by providing potential customers with an independent testimonial from a satisfied customer. Remember that even if a review has negative points, a customer will trust you for allowing them to read it, and so may buy an alternative product from you.