4 (+1) Ways to Regularly Update Your Website

This week we want to tell you more about updating your website. In our previous posts, we explained why you should keep your website updated. We also listed some ways to discover interesting and useful content for your site.

After you have your content, the next step is being able to update your site with it. Here are four ways to keep things up-to-date:

1. Put your blog RSS feed on your homepage
   If you have an existing blog, you can have your web developer add the Google AJAX Feed API to your site so all new posts will automatically show up on your homepage with links to the blog. We use the Google API to automatically add our posts in this blog to our corporate website.
2. Add your Twitter feed to your website
   Use Twitter and the Twitter feed widget to post short news items to your website. This is how we update our corporate news at http://www.kobayashi.ca/news.html.
3. Use a Flickr widget for images
   If you have images, consider including the Flickr widget on your site so all visitors can see the latest images you have added to your Flickr galleries.
4. Hire a web company
   The most straight-forward way to update your site is to have a web development company available for low-cost maintenance updates. However, Brent, President at Kobayashi Technology, warns about the different kinds of companies you can choose between. “Make sure you find one that is geared towards maintenance, because not all are – intentionally or not, some companies focus on the big projects, with the little updates put at the bottom of the list for ’when they have time‘”. You may even want to look for a web development company that offers copywriting and content services. They not only upload the new content to your site, but also interview you and your staff, and search the web to find interesting content and make it attractive for your visitors using images and videos.

+1: Content Management Systems

Can I do it all myself? This is one of the most common questions clients ask us. Brent explains how Content Management Systems (CMS) like WordPress have changed the concept and difficulty of ‘web updates’. “CMSs allow anyone with basic computer skills to update some or all of a website”, he comments. “About an hour of training will be enough to start you easily keeping your website up-to-date”.

Most popular CMSs – like WordPress, Joomla and Drupal – have friendly interfaces that make the process of updating your website easy for you. They usually include a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor to make HTML easy, and a media manager which helps you upload images and videos so you can insert them into your updates and make your content more attractive for visitors.

One thing to keep in mind

If your updates do not fit a pre-defined template, or have many elements such as pictures and video, you may still want to hire a professional to do the update, or at least tweak an update you have made.

This will help keep your website always looks its best, and doing the most it can to support your business.

Feel free to contact us at our Toronto office if you would like to know more about how to change and update your home page.