Website Maintenance Helps to Grow your Customer Base
By: Alan Smith
Submitted: 2010-01-01 22:36:03 | Word Count: 457
Is there some sort of routine maintenance you perform on your website whether on weekly or monthly basis?
One of the common problems that a website's visitor comes across is old, broken links. If you have linked to an outside or third party source then you might do well to check from time to time and make certain changes required. Remember this is especially true if your link is to a particular page or a blog entry as these are famous for getting switched; the website and the entry might still be there as it is, but if something about the particular link gets changed your visitors won’t be taken where you wanted them to go.
[ advertisement ]
The possibilities of websites are more likely to come and go, so you’ll have to judge from your own experience about how often to check for broken links. Remember that internal links are just as likely to break, especially if you have made links to photos or audio files; when you make a change to any element of your website, check through all the links that might have affected.
You can find several tools online that can help you to check for broken links. Few of them are absolutely free and they provide a great service.
If you’re interested in free software program that can work on your desktop, another way to maintain your website is doing what we’ll call is fixing leaks in the pipe. It’s likely that you have certain things that you want your website visitors to do, whether it is to visit an affiliate link of your own product, or sign up for newsletters. Remember that the route from a customer’s arrival at your website to the action that you want them to perform is often called your “pipeline”. You should check for leaks in your pipeline as a leaky pipe could provide a place for you to lose potential customers.
Here are a few of the places from where your visitors might leak out from and never return to your website:
Have you checked each of your subscription forms lead back to your website?
Are you using custom made “thank you” pages or depending on auto-generated ones? Auto-generated thank you pages might not lead back to your website.
Have you customized your error pages that link back to working parts of your website? Remember that if a customer finds a missing page and ends up on a default “404 error” page you may never see them again.
