Is Your Site Stale? Part I

Stale is a word commonly used to describe those old potato chips sitting at the bottom of your pantry. In the case of your web site, staleness takes on a similar meaning. Have you ever found yourself on a company’s web site with its latest press release from 2004? 2004. Four years ago. Four years of seemingly nothing happening at that company. But we have to give those guys credit because at least there was an attempt to keep the site fresh however short lived it may have been. Many times, there are no press releases or dated items to test for freshness. Just static content that may be ages old. Either scenario is bad for business. No one wants to go to a web site and question whether the content is still relevant today. Yet content is still just a buzzword. It’s tossed around as a commodity. To be effective, content must express something that your visitors will be interested in. Are you an IT company that just received Microsoft certification? Create a press release and at the very least, post it on your web site. Clients and prospects want to see that because it expresses your authority in the IT field. What’s an example of bad content? Anything that doesn’t relate to your visitors. For instance, posting an announcement that you just updated the contact form on your web site is meaningless content. Or starting a blog on your company’s web site and talking about your dog. Content for the sake of content won’t get you anywhere. Content that expresses something of value to your target audience will. In this series of postings, we’ll bring up some ways for you to keep your web site from ending up like that old bag of potato chips. Stay tuned!