Maintenance

There is a common misconception that creating your website is ‘most of the work’, but maintaining and evolving your website is a larger challenge in most cases. Content and graphics should change on a regular basis to sustain use and website traffic – stale websites are a liability for an organisation. This requires organisational commitment.

Best practice

In terms of staff you should bear the following considerations in mind;

• Budget both time and money for ongoing maintenance
• Make sure a specific staff member is designated and has “ownership” of website maintenance
• If you are not able to have one person specifically responsible for the website, make sure the content is clearly split up between a few people
• Have organisational ‘check-ins’ on a regular basis about the direction and content of your site

Content issues

• Ideally you should have “quick response” content ready or planned if you are launching a big campaign
• Make sure you remove out of date events or action alerts, especially if they are on the front page
• Think about simple devices that could keep content fresh on the web page. Are there ways to easily keep a small part of the information on your web site up to date and changing more frequently? Could you integrate a blog with updates from a range of people? What user-generated content could you include?

Social web & user generated content

To maintain your website, keeping it active, engaging and changing look at our Online Marketing section, with a special focus on the social web.

 

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Have your read our Message in-a-box Strategy Overview yet? Make sure your website
fits with your goals, audience, situation and messages. Go there
first and save your valuable time and resources.

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_{This material is based on the eAdvocacy Training materials produced by Aspiration in partnership with Radical Designs which are used with their kind permission and have been added to and adapted for this guide. These materials are distributed under a Creative Commons license: Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5.}