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Seasonal Change: Six Ways to Winterize Your Website

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Winter is just about here or coming soon. The days are getting very short and dark, there is quite a chill in the air and holiday preparations are coming up. I thought I would take the opportunity to share some pointers about ways you can “winterize your website”.

1. Clean Your Gutters

On a house those things are quite functional, but can get cluttered up with junk when we’re not paying attention. Same things on your website. “Gutters” can be your website menu, sidebars, footers, or sometimes even your homepage – with when everything is a “featured item”, it’s hard to choose.
When it comes to cleaning out the gutters, just remember this saying: “When faced with too many options, we tend to choose none.”

2. Make sure your furnace is in top condition.

Nobody like their heating to shut down in the middle of winter. I often call your products and service your “economic engine” (credit to Daniele LaPorte for the term) – and so you always want to make sure that your furnace is primed and ready to go.  Some things to think about from the website perspective:

  • Are your most profitable services easy to find?
  • Are your mot popular services easy to find?
  • Does the site address questions that you get most frequently?
  • Is all information (hours, pricing, addresses, etc.) up to date and correct?
  • Are all of your current products and services listed?
TIP: Mark your calendar to review your website every month. Stuff changes!

3. Check and repair drafty spaces

If you are using WordPress like me, you probably have lots of items set to “draft” but that is not what I am talking about. Just like in a house, you can have cold drafts come in and ruin the warm atmosphere you’ve been trying to build. That could take many forms, such as spammy or off topics comments that need cleared (or worse, you not replying to comments that customers have left), lots of bad reviews on your products.
Bonus points if you take a minute to look through your analytics and identify poor performing pages.

 

4. Reverse your fan

You know that you need to switch the way your ceiling fan runs for the winter, making sure it helps to push warm air back down from the ceiling. The purpose of a fan like that is simply to help things run more smoothly. What’s the equivalent on your website? For many of you, this will be your seasonal promotions and discounts – perhaps just featured items in a shop or on the homepage, or the items highlighted in your blog sidebar.
While you don’t need to go into the deep end with Christmas-y banner ads and the like, a little bit of flair here and there is great for making people smile an keeping the flow moving right along

 

5. Avoid frozen pipes.
Frozen pipes can cause massive problems. But they are fairly easily avoided. Does your site have problems like that? You know the ones – technical glitches that you have not bothered to have investigated, graphic design work that your you have been putting off, and other blockages either front and center or behind the scenes that are slowly getting in the way of your biz?

Clear the way so that your sales pipe(line) doesn’t get frozen up.

 

Credit to Andy Hayes


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