What is the Best Way to Manage a Small Business Website?

“Alright, our new website is launched,” the marketing director proudly says before leaving to get a cup of coffee, or, depending on the time of day, grab a beer to celebrate.

With so much focus on the launch, many organizations lose sight of managing the website after the launch. So, let’s look at some ways to ensure your small business website is managed properly.

How to Manage a Small Business Website

1.) Look at your resources. Before you start a new website project, consider the resources you have to manage a website and think about the goals and objectives of your website. You will need to update it regularly, ensure it has relevant content, and clear and crisp calls to action. It should also deliver business value to your organization.

Now, look at what resources you have available–human resources, contractors, interns, or someone on your marketing or IT teams. For a small organization, it may be the owner and an assistant. Think about your day-to-day process to determine how you can manage a website. Once you realize what kind of resources you have, you can jump into the details of the day-to-day or week-to-week management of a small business website.

2.) Generate content. Whenever a website is launched, don’t leave it to become static and fall behind the times. You must create new content on a regular basis whether it’s via a third party service, a small team, or you generate it yourself. Have a process in mind so you can share those responsibilities ensuring content is loaded on a regular basis. Consistence is key, whether its multiple times a day or once to twice or month.

3.) Maintain the website. If you use a content management system using plug-ins or modules, ensure they are updated and check for security vulnerabilities. Often, a third party team will do this via an ongoing maintenance agreement. If your maintaining the website in-house, ensure you do this on a regular basis. We recommend running security checks on a monthly to quarterly basis. You don’t want your site to become compromised. It can be a huge headache to fix (and costly).

Developing a Small Business Website Strategy

Example of how we can help:

Problem

One of our clients is an international organization with a sizable marketing department. They’re headquartered in the U.S., but operate in five continents. Before we started working with them, their old website hadn’t been updated in at least four years. Unfortunately, the firm who built the site had folded and left no way for anyone else to easily make updates.

When this organization got in touch with us, we started by discussing content responsibilities. This included building our rules for the marketing departments who represented each continent, while the larger U.S. marketing team would take over the elements of the website itself, along with ongoing maintenance.

Solution

We worked with them to ensure team member files were updated, case files were written, press releases were sent, and events were posted and maintained. We set up a process to ensure the team knew how they were going to schedule content each month from updating their events to managing press releases. The schedule was as follows:

• 1st and 15th of the month: add/update events
• First Tuesday of the month: post new press releases
• Tuesdays and Thursdays: post new blogs
• Once a month: check and update files
• Once a quarter: publish 1-4 case studies

The team didn’t have the technological expertise to handle ongoing maintenance, so we maintained the site. This included keeping the content management system updated, testing security vulnerabilities, and recording automated backups of the site.

The site’s been up a few years now, and performs exceedingly well for the organization. It’s seen a 1,000% increase in overall lead generation (not that that was too hard) throughout the site and garnered over half a million dollars of business in the first eight months.

Keep in mind, a website’s always a work in progress. At some point, that baton will be handed off from the web designer/development team to the small business team. So, treat it like a relay. Once the baton gets handed off, you should have a plan in place for your leg of the run.

Want to chat about how your organization can make the most of their leg of the website relay?