Maintaining and Improving Your Website

Article Summary: Maintaining your website is an on-going process. This section looks at some things that you will need to do to maintain your website. As your experience and skills improve, you may want to improve your sites appearance and usability. The second part of this guide offers some details on how to improve your site.

Maintaining Your Website

Provide Regular Updates
It's important to make sure that the contents of your web pages are always kept fresh and up-to-date. Every site, even the smallest one needs a plan of keeping it up-to-date. How often you want to update your website however depends on your own circumstances. For a small online tutoring business, you want only want to update your website only when you have new projects or promotions. For larger websites offering tutoring services to hundreds of students, you may want to update your courses and any special offers as soon as they become available. If you're going to do a lot of updates, make sure that you don't take down your old web pages completely. Some websites put up a page that reads: "Our web pages are currently under construction, please check back later for further updates." From the perspective of a visitor or a supporter, seeing this message is very annoying and it makes your business appear very unprofessional. Instead, like a newspaper company that is committed to a deadline, apply the same principle to your website updates.

Respond to Email Requests
Responding to emails is part of maintaining your website. Don't do automated replies whenever someone sends you an email. It takes away the human interaction, instead try to reply as soon as possible - or at least within 48 hours of receiving the message. People may not remember who they contacted. At the end of every email, its always a good idea to put a signature line - your name, position, your email address and your website address.

Improving Your Website

Choosing A Color Scheme
As your skills in website design grows, you may want to establish an attractive color scheme to keep your site coherent. A good color scheme gives your website a consistent look and feel. Choosing conflicting colors may distract your visitors attention. If you're unsure about your color choices, or if you have problems deciding on color combination, you can check them with the many color schemer tools that are freely available online or visit http://websitetips.com/color/ for more information about color schemes.

Simplify Your Web Page Design
Web surfers are very impatient! Studies reveal that most first-time visitors will spend only 10 seconds on a site before deciding if the site has some value to offer. Don't waste those precious few seconds creating a difficult or distracting website. Many professional designers believe that the simple, "no-frills" type website works best. Visitors don't want to spend the time looking at impressive designs and flash presentation, they want something that they can understand. Here are some points for keeping your site simple:

Links - visitors expect their links to be blue and underlined. Though this may seem limiting from a designers point of view, what really matters is that it is clearly recognizable for your viewers.

Presentation - don't use too many banners and links - only put up what is relevant. Be careful when setting video, audio or flash presentation to go automatically play. Many visitors find them very distracting, and they'll try to turn it off. If they can't it's probably likely they'll leave without ever having looked at your content.

Content - Avoid technical and essay like contents. Keep your pages within 300-500 words. Simple and readable content works best.

Get Feedback From Your Visitors
Probably one of the most important element you can put on a website is a visitors feedback form. It may be a quick survey asking some suggestions for improvements, or it may be a link to a simple email form requesting for visitors to report any errors that they see on your site. As a designer, your opinion my not be objective, but with some good feedback you'll learn a lot about what your visitors think, what they like and what they'd like to see more of.

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