Housekeeping – is it necessary?

byHudson

3.5K followers

11 years ago

What exactly do I mean by housekeeping – is this cleaning the home or money to spend on the food we buy – no nothing so usual as that.

What I mean is the micro clean up of the content and web sites that we are building in our online businesses. I recommend it as an ongoing process which we should all spend some regular time on, because I have noticed recently in my own case that as I drive forward more pages and blog articles the quality of the finish can sometimes suffer.

Let me give you some examples if I may?

1. The perfect Blog or Post.
• We all think we have done a blog or a post or page perfectly don’t we - but:
- Spelling errors – unforgivable but they will creep in – I found one on my home page. I had written specialise on instead of specialise in; MSword will not pick this up.
- Punctuation - I found no question mark at the end of a question; MSword will not pick this up.

2. Have you completed your SEO stuff on each post or blog?
• Have you done the tags?
• Do the links go where you want them to go, have you tested them to make sure?
• Is there a CTA on the pages you want them to be on, and does that work also?

3. Review the site – does it look good, and is it pleasant to be on?
• Can visitors understand what you are selling or promoting, does it make sense to them?
• Can visitors navigate around easily and as you want them to – try it yourself and see.
• Does the site load okay and in a minimal time?

4. Does the site back up to Dropbox (or wherever) work each week as you scheduled?
- I assumed mine did after a number of tests but one week it did not – what would have happened if I had needed that back up – so every so often I check that it has worked.

I think I have laboured the point enough and I am sure that many of you who do regular housekeeping like this will be able to add more regular checks to this short list above.
.
The fact is that there is no such thing as a perfect site in the terms we are talking about here and I recommend that we do need to do this housekeeping to make sure the errors are minimised. It makes sense to do this when you have had a break from the site, so that you come back to it with a fresh set of eyes – and do read the whole blog through if you want to check the detail – as irksome as that may be and you may have done it ten times when you published it. The devil as they say is in the detail.

The key reason why you should do this?

Is that visitors to your site are turned off completely if:

- They have no clear idea what your site is about, or what you are promoting.
- There are words spelt incorrectly and the resultant sentence makes no sense.
- The punctuation is missing or worse wrong.
- They click on a CTA and find themselves on a post where they were told they would be – they will not go back – don’t think they will.
- They find it difficult to navigate around your site.

I can assure you that the end result of these type of errors will be the visitor leaving your site and not coming back, and worse - you will not know about it!

It’s a bit like you going to a shop and getting bad customer service isn’t it? You talk with your feet by leaving the shop and making a note not to go back, most often without telling the owner – same with a badly maintained site really isn’t it?

One question – do you want that to happen to you?