Spring Cleaning Your Website

wordpress.com/2010/04/spring20cleaning11.jpg” alt=”http://hirshfields.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/spring20cleaning11.jpg” width=”256″ height=”169″ />Spring cleaning and fall cleaning are terms everyone is aware of, but what about the summer and winter? There is no reason to assume it is okay to slide on those seasons – especially when it comes down to site maintenance. There are several things you can do to freshen up your site without going overboard and investing a ton of time and money.

While it may sound simple, take a tour of your site as a visitor. Click through the pages and see what grabs your eye first. Ask yourself if the content on the page that attracts your attention right away is really the content you NEED to have highlighted. With a few simple shifts, you can change the layout of pages to make sure your visitors are seeing the steak first instead of the vegetables.

While you are roaming around your site, randomly click some links to make sure that they not only function properly, but to give your site a quick functionality test. Look for issues like redirect lags. Is it taking way too long to get where you are going? If it is then you may want to get your tech team to boost things up a bit. The quicker you get people where they need to go – like your order page – the more likely you are to convert.

Take a few seconds to read your content as well. Make sure that it is well written and still relevant for sure, but check out how user friendly it is from a technical standpoint as well. Is the font easy to read? Do the letters pop off the background sharply or do they blend into the background a little bit? Do you find yourself squinting to read the characters or leaning in toward the screen? If so, then a few little tweaks can do wonders to help make the text appear more friendly.

These are all little things you can do here and there without creating a huge project. Take a few minutes twice a week to poke around your site, and by the time spring and fall cleaning sweeps do arrive you will be amazed at how much less effort needs to be expended on those projects. Your visitors have a more user friendly site, your staff doesn’t have to live in fear of the big seasonal cleanup projects and along the way you are primed and ready to make more sales because you have a site that keeps people in place because they have no excuse to look elsewhere for what they need.