Audit Your Website for the New Year

Inlet Media .com has only existed in its current form since June of 2008 and already I don’t like it. All I can see is what’s wrong with it. The flaws, things I should have done differently and embarrassing errors. Now maybe thats just my obsessive nature taking over but I want to focus then on auditing my website, and why you should as well.

Every business goes through moves, changes in personnel and simply does things wrong. A website can be one of the worst aspects of this because it is so easy to put something online, publish it, and forget.

Take a look through your website in these first few weeks of this new year and make sure you have done some of these simple website chores.

• Make sure your contact information is correct, especially your email addresses.
• Go through all of your pages and check for spelling, grammar and layout issues.
• Make sure that your online marketing material online echoes your brand.
• Check the footer of your website where most of the copyright information is and update it to the next year. You would be surprised how often this information is totally wrong.
• Look over your old blog entries or other items you have written. I challenge you to read them all and see how you have developed over the year. What has improved, and what needs to be worked on.
• Check your links, both internal and external. Make sure that they are not broken. If the page you are linking to has disappeared, then remove it.
• Go over your Search Engine Optimization policy, what has worked and what has not?
• Is your site organized or do you feel lost? If you have problems with your site then your users do as well. Take the time to reorganize it now.
• Audit your passwords, this is something you should do with all of your computers and websites especially. Change your passwords to keep your data secure. This should be done more often than once a year, but I know people don’t do this.

The internet is a constantly moving environment and it is always incredibly surprising to see everything that has accumulated over the year. Try to clean up the gunk before another year goes by.