I tell clients to consider their website similar to a vegetable plot (we call those ‘allotments‘ in the UK).
An effective vegetable plot is not the result of a single activity. Instead, it is the result of key blocks of work (e.g. digging out the plot, fertilizing etc). In addition to that are regular maintenance and day-to-day/seasonal tasks.
We need to think about our websites like vegetable plots.
With your website, you may well need specialist help for some of the key blocks of work, but you will be able to do a lot of the essential day-to-day care tasks. These are the tasks which tend to get easily overlooked, which is why many websites get overrun with digital weeds; becoming out of date and redundant – hindering your online effectiveness (rather than helping it).
A lot of businesses are in a bit of a holding pattern at the moment whilst they get used to the ‘new normal‘ thanks to Covid-19. Some of you may be finding you have more time on their hands to look at internal projects, in this series of short posts I just want to go over some of the points you can consider when improving your site, and improving without having to invest in lots of money.
We’ll start by taking a holistic view of the overall structure of your site.
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Visualise your website structure
Why not set up a project to start visualising your website page structure. This could be as simple as post-it notes on a wall, or a more complex diagram drawn with an appl. Start from the homepage, and place a post-it for each major page or section on your site (here is a video on how to use an online app to draw your website structure).
Once you’ve done that: reflect.
- Do you have all the content here that your audience need?
- Which elements could be restructured/edited?
- Which elements could be updated?
- What needs to be added/removed?
Make a list of all these tasks.
Perhaps divide the tasks by effort and/or the ones you can do yourself.
You don’t have to do them all in one day! Take on a task each week or fortnight.
Nurture your website.
Joel
p.s. Aside from the regular articles we post on this blog, we’ll also add to this short series which will hopefully give you some ideas for how you can work your website.
Please just get in touch if you have any comments or questions.
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