The Importance of Regularly Updating Website Content
While the functionality and design of a website may remain relatively unchanged over time, it is crucial to frequently update and modify the content. This includes static information, blog posts, calendar entries, staff profiles, and more. Regularly updating these elements is necessary to keep visitors engaged and to improve the website’s ranking on search engines.
Effectively developed and maintained web content can greatly enhance the user experience. However, neglecting to manage this content can quickly lead to stale information, damaging not only the reputation of the website but also its visibility on search engines.
Don’t fall in the trap of unmanaged web content!
DO MORE with your website!
We offer free content maintenance for small website content changes. But is it enough?
We touched upon the subject of Content Updates in our post “Web Hosting for Small Business. Beware of the Gimmicks!”. Clients are telling us constantly that no matter how simple we make it for them with our state-of-the-art Content Management System (CMS), they prefer to ask US for changes on their websites. Unlike mainstream small business website hosts, here at COMMbits small changes are always part of our Business Web Hosting service and offered at no extra cost.
But how about larger more demanding, or constant changes? How about blogging, for example, or maintaining content on a large web page, or adding new staff profiles, editing photos, etc?
Where many websites fail:
Traditionally, website owners are asking (and receiving) access to their site so that they can perform their own content changes. Of course, we do provide such editing-level access and we train our clients on how to manage content on their site using the WordPress interface. (In fact, as mentioned above, minor changes are already included in all our business hosting contracts.)
Stop neglecting your site!
You are loosing BIG time!
(For example, Search Engines will penalize you for a stale, old website.)
No matter what we do and how we try to help, we find time after time that people neglect their web sites for long periods of time. From our experience, the following are the main reasons:
- Small Business Web site owners don’t have the time to update their own sites
- The person who learned how to do this is long gone from the organization. New person assumes it’s “not their job”.
- Most importantly, the person who is given the responsibility for web site updates, is not qualified for the job, and it is not their fault! This is simply a matter of wrong perception at many levels of management in a smaller company/Organization: A qualified web designer is needed for this task: Know how to build a beautiful blog post.
As a Small Business, most likely you do not have an on-board, qualified web designer!
Technical challenges of web site content maintenance
Content Maintenance requires proficiency in a variety of subjects: Web design, creative design, Photoshop, graphic formats, local and remote caching, security, SEO techniques, using modern web design elements, HTML coding, creative writing, and other technical aspects.
Consider the following tasks:
- How to prepare images for the web. Scaling and optimization, color-correction, cropping, etc.
- How to write creatively. With proper titles, and accents.
- How to separate paragraphs creatively, if the nature of the post calls for it. Colored backgrounds, shaded sections, Call-To-Action segments, etc.
- How to make the post overall interesting and enticing to the visitor.
- If a post is related to other website content, hyperlinks must be added accordingly. And how those hyperlinks are constructed is actually quite important to your website’s Search Engine placement. You do have an SEO strategy, don’t you?
- Proper categorization, keyword tagging, etc.
- In the event on-line calendars are kept on a website, and calendar updates are required, it’s important to keep all entries intact, even repeating ones, with the correct links throughout. Take a look at our valued client Grace Church of Oakville, where we have content management responsibility, including managing the online calendar.
- Constant maintenance of member profile pages, staff listings, etc., complete with styling, photos, etc. For an example, see the “Memorium” section of the DUCC website.
We have the solution to all this!
Welcome to COMMbits Website Content Management
It takes A LOT of work to stay on top of things!
Simply put, let us do all the website content management for you! It flows naturally within your own process, and it is more affordable than you think!
Advantages:
- Low cost. Instead of hiring a qualified web designer on your full-time or part-time, it’s much more cost-effective to hire us.
Note: The cost of hiring a full-time creative web designer who also has adequate technical knowledge on the broad areas your website management will require would be an est. CAD$70K/year, minimum. Also, people on career paths willing to accept part-time involvement for work of this caliber will be almost impossible to find. The only solution is to outsource this task. - We maintain many sites, which brings economies of scale and a lower cost to you.
- Fast and accurate. We’ve been doing this many years, and experience makes us very fast and accurate. There are no headaches!
The Process:
Once your Website Content Maintenance Contract is in place, simply use your Help Desk system or email us at [email protected] with your request, and watch your ticket change from “In-Progress” to completed and “Closed”!
Multiple people from your Organization can use the system, which makes it easy and simple for all your staff to track all tickets, what was the action from our end, what’s pending, etc. Our system keeps track of time spent on each ticket, which allows us to adjust your contract accordingly at its maturity, or earlier.
Cost – It’s cheaper than you think!
We price our Website Content Management contracts very competitively, taking under consideration the estimated number of hours we need to support your content maintenance needs.
The contract duration is usually one year at a time. We are taking care of ALL web content management needs, with zero headaches from your end. Time records are available for the purpose of accountability and future contract adjustments.
For small websites, a contract that covers an average of 2 hrs a month is natural. Larger websites, with more frequent, and/or intricate content updates, may require contracts in the neighborhood of 8 hrs per month, or more.
In a nutshell, your cost to keep your website fully updated at all times varies depending on website size and required work involved, starting at an estimated CDN$1,500/year. Please submit the form below and we will be in touch with your custom quote.
Please note that we also offer professional copy writing services.
Example inclusions:
- Blogging (you send us your raw content, a title, a featured image unprocessed, and we do the rest.)
- Staff or Member page updates
- Content updates throughout the site
- e-commerce in-depth support (enter new products, etc.)
- Photo editing and optimization for the web
- Basic SEO throughout the site during content maintenance (i.e. Intralinks with targeted keywords for high SEO performance). We also offer separate Toronto SEO Services.
Photo by Carl Heyerdahl on Unsplash
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