Freshen up.

I’m often asked what one overlooked factor in creating a good website. First and foremost, it’s freshness. Putting a website out there and then leaving it be is a little bit like going fishing, baiting the hook at 5am, and fishing all day. Eventually, the fish are gonna get tired of looking at what’s on your hook, so they won’t bother ever coming back.

But what’s the best way to keep your content fresh? There are a few strategies you can employ:

Have a blog – by sharing your expertise with the world, you’re giving the world a reason to keep coming back. Don’t have time to write a blog? Then find appropriate content on other sites and add a comment to try to show your audience how it applies to them.

Don’t bother blogging, tweet – If you can’t keep up with a blog, don’t bother starting. There’s nothing worse than starting a blog and quitting. The occasional “Sorry I haven’t written anything in a while” post is forgivable, because everybody gets busy from time to time. But when you’re surfing and you come across a site with a blog that hasn’t been updated for several years, you’re left thinking that the company (or agency, news organization or whatever) is out of touch. So tweet. It’s only 140 characters. And it can be used like a mini-blog. Share news. Comment on and link to other people’s content. And by all means, include a widget on your website that’s a running log of your tweets.

Have a news page and keep it active – The cousin of the blog is the news page. They serve similar purposes (at least some content should be common to both), but the difference is that while blogging allows you to share your expertise, news pages tend toward only allowing you to share your news. Now, what’s news? Anything. “We won a major award in our industry.” “We posted the best second quarter in our history.” “New hire added to bolster our lawn maintenance staff.” Anything you’d put in a press release can be boiled down and released right on your website. Would anybody care? It doesn’t really matter. Fresh is fresh.

Have some kind of interactivity – Would a game be appropriate to your business? For most companies, that answer is no. But perhaps there’s some other form of useful tool that’s appropriate to your business and will keep people coming back. How about a loan calculator on a banking site? How about a top box office for the week list with the ability to share comments on a movie theater site? Or maybe if you’re a tire and wheel installer, you can have a widget that allows people to picture the various wheels on a picture of their car. Think of what your customers might want or need and put it there.

Create a mini social networking site – Does your industry lend itself to social networking but isn’t already served by a social site? Would it be good for your salespeople to directly interact with current and potential clients?

Leave it to the experts – Keeping content fresh is hard work. Luckily, there are services out there that can carry most of the burden, while maintaining your site’s freshness and even making you look like an industry expert. I’d be glad to help you with that. So feel free to shoot me an email and I’ll help out.