5 Must Do Site Maintenance Tips to be Seen as a Trusted Expert
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Another important part of being a Trusted Expert is doing proper site maintenance. And I’m not talking about just doing testing, either – it goes further than that. Bottom line, you won’t be seen as a Trusted Expert unless your site is properly maintained. So here’s what you need to do:
1. Consistently check for broken links on your site. You won’t be seen as any kind of expert, much less a trusted one, if you’re asking people to click on links that then go nowhere. Pointing people to useful information can only help them see you as a Trusted Expert – just make sure that you regularly check those links to make sure they are still valid as well as adding new ones when you find them.
2. Make sure to keep all pertinent info updated. To give you an example, I was recently contemplating a purchase from an online retailer. They weren’t a large, well known brand name, but they looked like they were trustworthy and secure, and since they had the best prices for what I was looking for, I was willing to give them a try. So I clicked on the ‘About Us’ section, which gave me info about their history (good), where they were physically located (also good) as well as some testimonials (should have been good but….) The problem with the testimonials? The most recent one was from 2007. And just like that, I lost faith in the retailer, and decided not to purchase from them, because either they hadn’t had a good review since 2007 and so had nothing to put up, or they were too lazy to proper site maintenance and update their ‘About Us’ section more than once every 5 years or so.
3. Conduct some low-level usability tests. I’m not saying that you need to go through the whole exercise of conducting full-blown usability tests (unless you’re a fairly big retailer, and then you absolutely should invest the money in it.) But what you can do (for free) is recruit some friends or colleagues to do a few simple tests. Think about something that the average visitor to your site would want to do – either get information on a specific thing, or make a purchase. Then go through the steps needed to do that – how is the process? If you can get friends to do it who haven’t been to the site or performed that action before, you can get some very valuable feedback about how your user views your site, an d how you can improve their experience.
4. Ask your customers for feedback on their experience. And actually listen. A big part of being a Trusted Expert is building a relationship with your users, and becoming their go-to guy for whatever your niche is. So once you manage to get them there, listen to what they want. Maybe they liked most of it, but they’d prefer if you had user reviews for your product, or they’d like to see what shipping costs would be before they get to checkout. Remember, the site is for them, not for you.
5. Keep the site updated, but don’t change everything all the time. It can be tempting, in the name of staying current, to always update the site with the latest images and graphics. But if you change things too much, people won’t recognize it. If you invest the time in the design of the site at the beginning, then you won’t have as much trouble with it. Strive to maintain a balance between keeping things fresh and keeping things familiar. You want people to feel comfortable and trust you, but you also want to be seen as current. I know that was kind of vague, but it’s something I can’t give you strict guidelines for – just be aware of it.
A Trusted Expert is someone who is one the ball, and is always their for their users as a resource. By performing proper site maintenance, you’ll ensure that the people you’ve managed to bring to your site will continue to see you that way, ensuring a lasting relationship that’s beneficial to you both.
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A lot of marketers definitely don’t check for usability. This is key because you don’t know what your users are struggling to navigate through your website
Great reminder for startup merchants, specially the payment gateways should be flawless because I’ve experienced it myself at the beginning.
This article is an eye openener since most of us take site maintainance for granted. Come to think of it. Great insight.
I couldn’t agree with you more jason. I hve Just set up a web design company called webdev after teaching myself web design. I think that cients testimonials can help make a business grow after all people talk and cn spread the word around
Thanks for shring this post Jason and please excuse my spelling s I am typing this on my new xperia x10 and my thumbs are too big. Lol.
All the best.
-Phillip
Yes I have been doing the broken link checking about once a week via Webmaster Tools. The only thing is sometimes if a link is out already and it becomes broken via a twitter post or it was on someone else website, you can’t change that. I do try and tell my visitors when they come to a broken link to report it to me but that’s a 50/50 chance.
And I do agree about old testimonials, 2007 is way old. 2009 would have been better. Makes you think they don’t even care about their site anymore!
Hello Jason, I’m sure you have a bug on my computer? I was doing just that thing today and updating an XSitePro page on my site!
Spooky!
We have been doing some changes and modifications to our site. We are using our conversion rate as a method of testing our changes/usability. We are about to send out a survey with incentive to fill it out. Are there other ways / metrics to test how well your changes are doing?
Good points Jason, I have been turned off of a few sites for this reason too, dead links or old information. There is a free online service that will scan your website and send you periodic email reports of its findings (dead links found or not). I use Linktiger, but there may be others. This seems to work pretty good. It can be quite challenging to keep ones site maintained, and also work on new campaigns…But I agree it is very important.
It does get tempting to change with the latest graphics and especially with the latest plugins…it seems I am starting to turn into a plugin junkie!
excellent advice. Specially integrating a feedback mechanism in a way that really gets useful feedback is something that many overlook.
wow, talk about bad timing… your site goes to a suspended page from your host… and to top it off their suspended page is way tacky with popup ads and it makes my malware scanner go nuts lol..
Add to the list of things not to do…
1. Use a shady host
2. Comment on a post like this and have your site suspended..
tough deal man, timing is everything I guess
Good tips. Obviously outdated About pages drive me crazy. Not just the testimonials, but the bios and corporate histories often age.
I have had success with a WordPress plugin, Broken Link Checker, which alerts me in the dashboard when links go down.
Number two is an excellent point, especially if you are going to be spending some hard cash. I would have done just the same as you, there is no way I would put trust in a site that never updated important info.
These tips are very helpful. And while some are common sense, sometimes we lose sight of that and this serves as a great wake-up call. These actually come at a great time for me to review my blog with because I recently switched to a new blogging platform which can create broken links that you don’t necessarily catch. So thank you!
Awesome post. I forgot the name of that software (desktop installed) to check the broken links. It was really good and used to run through all your blog links to report problems.
And when it comes to updating the site, one thing I really hate is the frequent WordPress upgrades
There are hundreds of websites with broken links and they don’t know it. There are excellent free tools on the internet to check for your broken links, so there is not excuse to have them.
As you said in your post, it is just a matter of doinh periodical check ups to your sites.
Regards,
Alex.
Another tip – check your website works in different browsers! How many websites can you visit and have to bale out because you are using Firefox and the website has not been tested in it!
Indeed. But if the website is very big with lots of pages its hard to track broken links etc. Is there any tools to help in such situation?
Nice information for new starter
There are hundreds of websites with broken links and they don’t know it. There are excellent free tools on the internet to check for your broken links, so there is not excuse to have thM
Thanks for shring this post Jason and please excuse my spelling s I am typing this on my new xperia x10 and my thumbs are too big.