Observations from a dimly lit office.
The 3-Step Guide to Rescuing Websites from Insignificance: Step 3.
It’s the last step of the “3-Step Guide to Rescuing Your Website from Insignificance.” You’ve already written your website like you don’t think anybody will read it, and laid it out like you’re organizing for a busload of curious, self-directed tourists. So your next step is to …
3. Never finish.
Update forever. For a retirement community, fresh content is as important as fresh produce at a farmer’s market. While service descriptions — independent living, skilled nursing, Life Care, etc. — hardly need to be refreshed, unless the offered services are changed, an inert website for an active community isn’t representative.
Tap the energy of your community’s people, stories and events. Add photo galleries, blogs, user comments and a community calendar. Publish a recipe, green tip or resident profile of the week. Include RSS feeds for news articles about senior health, nutrition and lifestyles. Post information about area events — plays, music, lectures and special events in your city. Your website, in short, can create your entire brand, exposing users to more facets of your community than any other medium.
Users will scan your service descriptions in their quests for answers to their questions. But they’ll notice the rest and collect additional information about what kind of people live in your community, and what kind of experts you are in matters relating to healthy senior lifestyles.
Content fact: Users are lazy — and that’s a good thing. Because once you’ve written and laid out your website with highly usable information, users will prefer returning to your site instead of picking through a host of other sites that are poorly written and organized.
Don’t forget: You want leads and your website wants to help. Keep clear and present the buttons that link users to you — email, phone or USPS contact from you.
Nag: Think hard before making major overhauls to your layout. Users will adapt to your changes, but they’ll be annoyed. After all, nobody likes change. Better to get it right the first time.
As a corollary, don’t be so anxious to have your website known until you’ve worked and re-worked the layout and have sufficient content to pique curiosity.
It’s easy to get ahead of yourself, especially when you’re excited about an idea, but this is really good advice. Thanks!