Recently, I have gotten back into roadracing motorcycles after a 7 year hiatus (here are some photos that Yermo took this past weekend, 2008-09-20). Before the weekend, I had to get some minor repairs done to my leathers. I called and talked to Connie at Vanson (the company that made the leathers) and they asked me the last time that I’d given them a cleaning. I had to admit that it had been quite a long time. A full-on “proper” cleaning is moderately involved and can take some time, of which most racers don’t have a lot of. Connie said that a quick and easy thing to do was to hit them with any furniture polish and a soft rag. She went on to say that because it was so quick and easy to do that the benefit of the quick cleaning a few times a season was far better than doing nothing at all.
That got me thinking about small businesses and websites, and that the same axiom applies. You are far better coming up with a strategy to make regular, even minor, updates to your site than doing nothing at all.
As I have mentioned in previous articles, your website should become a valuable resource to people who are looking for information about your product or service.
The best way to further that goal is to just fill it with content. Unfortunately, most small businesses that I know just don’t have the time to spend weeks or months when they redesign, or redevelop their site to write content. Moreover, many of them do not have their website set up with a CMS (Content Management System) that enables them to easily make updates and changes without having to know how to write HTML/CSS/server-side code, navigate FTP programs, and get everything working properly with their hosting environment. The typical result is that because it is so time consuming that the website is never updated.
The solution: get your small business website set-up so that you can use one of the many CMSs out there and come up with a plan whereby you can set aside 20 – 30 minutes a couple of times a month to add a few things to your site. Like cleaning my leathers with furniture polish vs. the full-on “proper” cleaning, it’s far better than doing nothing at all.
In the case of your website, it will continue to grow on a regular incremental basis that fits into your schedule and will hopefully increase your search engine ranking, your relevant traffic, and ultimately your bottom line.
— Ryan Chapin
President, Nuts & Bolts Interactive, Inc.