Gardening Rules for Your Website

As with last year, Lisa and I spent a great deal of time this holiday weekend working in our gardens. This year we took delivery of over four cubic yards of compost from the city which had to be spread around the various beds. We also planted and I used up the remaining retaining wall bricks from last year's project.

While trundling back and forth with wheelbarrows full of dirt, I began to reflect on how having a website for your business mirrors having a garden. What follows are the gardening rules for websites that I came up with over the course of several days.

1. You can get a lot done in a weekend, but remember, you still have to weed. After you build that website (or have it built), remember to budget time, effort, and/or money to maintain the site. Broken links, old information, both make your site look less than professional (and will reduce it's productivity).
2. You can get away with just adding a little fertilizer for quite a while, but eventually you really need to give the bed an overhaul. Just like your garden soil, your website can get old and tired and eventually you need to give it an overhaul. Ask your webmaster about the newest and latest tools to make your site as productive as possible. It's no longer sufficient just to have a website. It needs to be fresh and modern or you will look as out of date as your site.
3. Take time to figure out exactly how much compost you need. If you decide to upgrade your site (or are building it for the first time), have a long chat with your webmaster. What exactly do you need and why? Don't bother adding features which you don't actually need. That would be like order an extra cubic yard of compost than you need. It's a lot of work for no real purpose.

More tomorrow.