Having your own website is absolutely crucial in most work from home ventures, especially if you’re an entrepreneur or a freelance worker. How you present yourself and your business online will be a huge factor for your potential customers, and will often make or break deals. Sloppy appearances, outdated information, misspellings, difficult to navigate links, and too little information are all signs of a bad website and will send savvy consumers running. Small Business Trends lists 7 ways to revitalize your site and keep it working for you, rather than against you:
Fix your copyright dates:This is important site maintenance that makes sure your butt is covered and is especially important for online retailers where an old date may work as a negative trust signal.
Revitalize your content:Take some time to go through your site and evaluate your content. Does it still work? Are there areas that are vague and could be clarified?
Remove holiday images: If it’s after January 1st, take down any holiday images. Keeping up your Christmas/Hanukkah/whatever logos makes it looks like your site is still on vacation and that customers should go elsewhere for timely service.
Check your links: While you’re going through your site checking content, also look at the links on your site. Are they all going where they’re supposed to or are there broken links sending customers to cold 404 pages? If there are, take this time to fix them!
Update local listings if necessary: If you haven’t checked your listings in a while,GetListed.org is an invaluable service that will show you where you’re registered and what each site knows about you.
Look at site statistics: Are you running analytics on your site? If not, meet Google Analytics. It’s free and feature-rich. If you are, go through and figure out what were your most successful content pieces this year.
Redesign: Ask some fresh eyes to take a look at your site. Is it still professional looking and giving off the image you want?