Building a website is hard work – not just for us, but for clients too!
We collaborate, plan, design, develop, test, add content and test some more. After a lot of time and effort, your beautiful, brand-spanking-new website is finally live.
And then you’re done – right? Wrong!
Once you build your website, it’s just the beginning.
Having a website can be confusing.
To explain the different aspects of “having a website”, we like to use an analogy everyone can understand – like owning a car.
Your domain is like the license plate for your car, our license plate/domain is www.mediaboss.com.au. With it, you can be identified and located on the world wide web.
You can’t get a license plate for your car until you register it, nor can you have a domain for your website until you register it, either.
You also can’t have a website without a domain, registering your domain name ensures that no one else can use it.
Once you have registered your domain for your website,
you need a place to park your site.
Think of hosting as a “garage” the place where your website “lives” (much like where your car “lives” when you are not using it). Your website files “live” on a hosting server, where they sit and wait until called upon.
Your website will have a specific IP address, and when that address is accessed via the web, your website will turn up on that device.
40% of consumers will leave a page that takes longer than three seconds to load.
A website is fuelled by content and just like a car, you can’t travel anywhere with an empty fuel tank. If you don’t add regular content to your website you won’t get the necessary engagement or sales that you are looking for.
If you have a blog or news article feed and your last update was in 2015, then you need to get onto that quick smart. It’s better not to have a news section than one that is never used.
Putting fresh content on your website keeps the site up to date and lets Google know that your site is still relevant.
Just like your car, a website has complex software applications, that need to be kept up-to-date “serviced” for security and performance reasons.
This means regularly updating it’s software, as well as any plugins and themes to keep your website performing at its best.
If your WordPress dashboard is littered with little red dots alerting you to update your plugins and a sign along the top of the screen is telling you to update WordPress, you can’t ignore these warnings.
That domain name registrations were free for everyone prior to 1995, unfortunately this is no longer the case.
Sometimes for your car to run smoothly it needs to be maintained by replacing parts that do not work anymore.
Or maybe it is just too old now to fix, and you are better off replacing it with a new car.
Your website is the same, functions on your site that worked well years ago, aren’t that effective anymore or become so out-dated that you need to replace your site with a new system.
If you don’t add new content, your website may be seen as out-dated, which will then have a negative effect on your page ranking.
Out-dated content says “I don’t care”.
And if you don’t care about your website, then Google doesn’t either.