Your Online Presence > Strategy & Development

Getting A Website - Updating and Developing Your Site

By Lasa Information Systems Team

One of the benefits of having a site is that you can update it at low cost. This means that once your site is built the job is not necessarily over…

Having a website is much more like producing a magazine than producing a book. You need to change the site – probably sooner than you expect – and adding new material makes it more likely people will use it. However, running a dynamic site which changes frequently has resource implications in terms of staff time at least, and perhaps also in terms of software costs, training, developers’ fees and so forth.

Depending on the role the website plays in developing your organisation, you may decide to stick with a more static site, which will have less impact but use fewer resources.

Whatever your strategy, you need to perform some basic maintenance on the site:

• Review the site regularly to ensure it is up to date – if people see outdated information, they will lose trust in your site.

• Check all the links work – in particular ones to other sites.

• Respond to the feedback you get from users, and review it regularly.

• Include a date on every page, so users know how up-to-date the information is.

• Highlight updated content. On smaller sites, you can add a "new" graphic by links so users can see what has changed. Larger sites could have a "what’s new" section.

After going to all this effort, make sure people know your site exists!

• Include the address of your site on all your publications and stationery, as you would your address and phone number.

• Ask other organisations in your field if they will link their sites to yours, if you link to them. Many websites have a page of links to other useful sites.

• Make sure your site is listed on the most popular search pages. There are two ways to do this. First, register the pages on the search engines’ web sites. Second, make sure that your page is designed to work well with the automatic software that search engines use to index pages.

This page is one part of a longer document about getting a website. If youwant to read through the whole thing, you'll want to start with the Introduction.

If you are reading through all the parts of this document, this part is the last one.

Happy web building!