With all public events canceled for the duration, your website is a dozen times more important as a marketing tool than it was last month. You can no longer count on meeting new clients at local mixers and at writing conferences; now you have to recruit them online – and that includes on your website.
If you haven't touched your site in a while, now would be a good time to fix any errors, update the content, and refresh the design so that it looks inviting.
I spend a fair amount of time helping clients fix up their sites, and I'd like to share a few of the things that I look for when updating a site, then explain how you might go about the process of refreshing your site.
It all comes down to knowing what you should look for.
These are tough questions, I know. The average person has trouble spotting errors in their own work, and that can make it difficult to check the content. Furthermore, few have both the experience to answer the design questions and also the skills to answer the tech questions.. And frankly, this is quite the long list of questions (even for me).
This is why I think you should assemble a team to help you evaluate your site. You can think of this team like an author’s beta readers, and if you know any beta readers, that would be a good place to start. I would then ask your author friends to join your team (they bring a client’s eye to the project), and if you are good friends with a graphic designer, you might ask them for their opinion. (Obviously you shouldn't ask them to work for free, but perhaps you could find a way to trade favors?) You might also ask your techie friend to help by answering the tech questions.
Once you have assembled a roster of about twelve to twenty volunteers, break them up into smaller teams and assign each team specific questions to answer. Ask each team to look at specific pages on your site, and report back. You want to be thorough, so if possible have at least three people answer each question and check each page.
The reason you want to assign tasks to each team is so that all pages will get checked, and all questions will be answered. If you just let your helpers look at whatever they want, you will find that some pages will be checked by everyone while other pages won't be checked at all. The only way to make sure that all the issues on your entire site have been found is to give specific assignments.
When the answers start coming in, compile them into a list. Triage the list to identify which issues are important, and which ones aren't actually problems. Then sort the list into two lists, one for things you can fix yourself and another for things that you need someone else to fix for you.
Will your budget stretch to hiring an expert? If not, could you work out a trade or maybe learn how to do the work yourself?
A lack of money and time has killed more projects than I would like to admit, so don't beat yourself up too badly if you have to leave problems unresolved. Instead, add this project to your to do list so you can remember to get back to it one day.
Header photo by Andrew Neel on Unsplash.
