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Watch that freshness dateA lack of staleness is a good thing. We want our food to be reasonably fresh. We want our medicine to be unexpired. We even notice when our beer and pop are a little old. So too, we need to be paying attention to the freshness of our web sites. A stale site is the kiss of death. If I visit a site that hasn't been updated in a few months, or if it's got a copyright date of 1997, I immediately doubt its credibility. If it's a business page, I assume that the company may be out of business. Certainly the information provided, such as products, prices and specifications, must be out of date and useless. Just as you would question a piece of literature that showed people dressed in the wrong styles, or had an old date, or if you received a business card that was a little brown at the edges, you are naturally going to wonder about a site that hasn't been touched in a while. What can you do to avoid this problem? First of all, you can build a site that won't show its age. At The Gadwall Group, one of our services (although the concept is not unique and can be done yourself) is called "Web Card." This is nothing more than one web page that functions as an online business card for your company. There are no prices and no detailed product information - no information that is naturally date sensitive and prone to getting stale quickly. Only static, basic information is shown - exactly the kind of stuff you'd put on your corporate brochure, or on your business card. After you build such a page, you can forget about it. In fact, the rule of thumb should be that you review the page every time you find yourself having to order new business cards. This is a cheap, easy, fast and effective way for your company to be on the Internet. And you don't get demerit points if it's out of date...there isn't anything to be out of date. On the other hand, if your site is full of product information, pricing or other timely data, you need to be aggressive in keeping it up to date, deleting old information and giving your visitors confidence that you're paying attention and that they can trust any information that they find. One approach we've taken, as you may have noticed, is to put our "what's new" information in the right hand column of the home page. This immediately shows our guests that we have updated the site in the last few days, and shows them what has been updated. This will build the credibility of your entire site. One of the positions that is starting to emerge within organizations is a content specialist. Web designers generally spend a significant amount of time building your page, organizing everything, and taking care of the technical details. But once they're finished, you have to have someone take over who actually knows the subject matter and can maintain the actual material on the site - a content specialist. This person is charged with working within their organization to get articles written, product information and specs updated, phone lists revised, procedures approved, etc. for posting on the site, whether it is an intranet or Internet web site. They might still rely on the work of the webmaster or web designer to customize a page or develop some graphics, but they now will be doing the heavy lifting. In fact, one key design consideration that webmasters often miss is making sure their sites can be easily updated by non-technical staff. It might be great job security for the webmaster to make it really difficult to maintain the site without her, but it isn't helping keep your site fresh. Keep your web site up to date. Lots is written about the need to revise the format periodically to impress visitors and keep them coming. But if you can put actual usable content out there, kept up to date, they'll keep coming anyway. And they'll come for a better reason - because they're interested in your company - not in the design talents of your webmaster. Keep it fresh - avoid staleness and spoilage. Take a look at your web site. Is there a faint odor?
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