subject: Is your website content delivering you results? [print this page] The Importance of Keeping Content Up to Date
Imagine you're the owner of a successful car dealership but when your customers look at the cars listed on your website they notice that the cars are a month or so old or, even worse, they call you only to find out that that dream car they were looking at sold a week ago? This is hardly going to give them much confidence in the rest of your offering. On the other hand, imagine your web site has information that is accurate and up-to-date, where you can update car listings after a sale to respond to visitor queries and do all this easily, painlessly and without even phoning your website company? That, in a nutshell, is an effective website content management system.
I often ask people, do your sales people sleep at night and take breaks for lunch during the day?... They look at me like I'm strange or something, but then my point is made! People realise that, when designed properly, a website works for you twenty-four hours a day, doesn't take sick leave and proudly sells your business and handles support enquiries from your customers wherever they are, at any time of the day or night.
Give your website the attention it deserves
Just like sales teams require training, websites require attention too! In order to keep your customers interested, they need to have up-to-the-minute information to remain effective. You've spent all that money marketing your website, now you need to make sure you don't mislead people with poorly structured, old and boring content. The last thing you want is for this update process to take time, in fact, it is vital that you have the flexibility to control and change the content of your web pages when you want, not when your web design company gets around to it.
By providing a service where customers can DIY their content, website companies are getting wise to a real competitive edge. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to realise the web design company that can provide quick and easy-to-use web content management systems will have an edge over those who can only see this as a threat.
Web site companies should provide their customers with two choices. Concentrate on providing customers with the best tools to make changes easily, quickly and when they want while also giving customers the flexibility to continue to receive a service for updating their site (for those not quite so urgent updates). Giving customers more choice and more control very rarely fails.
