I was inspired to write this Blog post by a meeting I recently had with a client. I provided a design for the client a number of months ago and they have been using the site ever since. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss where the site was going to next.

Although they have fairly clear ideas of what they wanted from the site what they did not have was any structured view of how they were going to achieve their goals. The client appeared to have lost track of a fundamental rule of web design:

• Content is king

If you went back 10 years then you would find that the Web was littered with aesthetically beautiful websites that lasted 12 months or less. At the point of launch designers would rave about the look and feel of the site, how innovative it was, how they would be using it as inspiration for their next project. Six months later the site would still be there, but its’ traffic would have dwindled. Six months after that and the site would have disappeared. The reason? The content had stayed the same. Who wants to look at the same content all the time? Nobody.

I will give you a real world analogy. If I give you a copy of this morning’s newspaper then you will read it and learn something from the content therein. If tomorrow I give you the same newspaper to look at then you will be a lot less interested in the newspaper. If I do the same thing for a week then before the week is up you will probably have told me where to go with my old newspaper and, furthermore, where to shove it when I get there.

Website content needs to be fresh if you want people to keep coming back for more. So make sure that you update your content regularly, not in an ad-hoc way, ensure that you plan your content strategy. Follow a format. Have specific dates that you will update your content, be it daily, weekly or monthly. Realise that there is a commitment from you or your team to updating your site, do not let it be flavour of the month that trails off after six weeks because people can no longer be bothered with it. At first updating your site may seem like fun, but as with all things after a while familiarity can breed contempt. This is particularly true if you do not have any structure to how and when you intend to update your site content.

At this time of year we are getting towards the end of the summer period and some of the things that are coming up are:

• Back to school
• Halloween
• Bonfire night
• Christmas

Now is the time to be thinking about how you will freshen your sites content up with relevant information pertaining to these future events. If you plan ahead then you will find that it is much easier to create content that your users will appreciate, and the higher the quality of your content then the higher the return rate of your visitors will be.

Which are the sites that you find yourself coming back to again and again? Leave a comment and let me know your views.