Spring Cleaning
By Sanya Weathers
The tornadoes have stopped, the rain has ended, and the temperature in my neck of the woods is high enough to open all the windows. I’m finally ready to spring clean… my website.
What? Don’t you spring clean your website? This is not something you can skip, not if your business is online and your website is the first point of contact with your product and your brand.
Get out your vacuum attachments and the duster with the extra long handle, and let’s get to work:
– Clear the clutter. As you thought of more things that people really need to know, you’ve been adding stuff to the landing page. Links, buttons, flashing buttons because the Really Important Buttons were getting lost in the confusion, and promotional banners… your page is barely functional. Sit down and prioritize. Check your metrics to see what people are actually clicking. Invest in some nice organizational baskets, maybe hire a professional organizer (read: interface designer) as a consultant. Scrape all the clutter off your front page for an instant upgrade in usability, professionalism, and cool factor.
– Make the small repairs. Is anyone checking the “admin” email? The one people write to in order to report a problem. I’ll bet you a dollar those emails are being pre-sorted/routed into a subfolder and not being seen in the face of more immediate problems like servers crashing or company intranet failing. Get out those emails and run through the repairs.
– Spackle the broken links. Go through the site and click every link on every page. (This is something you can farm out to that nice intern that will start as soon as school lets out next month. It will build character.) Find your 404s, and fix them. Nothing says “we don’t really care” like 404s. Why send that message when you spend the rest of your online time talking about how much you…care?
– Look for things to update. Hey, I love burnt orange shag carpet as much as you do, especially because it looks so good with the avocado couch, but come on. How old are those screenshots? Archive them under “Ancient History” and put up the freshest ones you can take. Did you last update your FAQ the week before launch? Talk to your customer service people, I’ll bet there are better questions now. Do your instructions take into account any of the new features you’ve added in the last year? Why not?
– Stop living with the last owner’s stuff. You probably set up the website before your product went live. You designed things to match the product you planned. That’s fine. As soon as your product launched, your customers took ownership of it, and they probably started using it in ways you’d never considered. Your website should reflect reality, not the site you designed in a vacuum.