New Year–Time for your Website Annual Review

Annual Website Review Checklist 

Many websites grow almost as large as a house.  Throughout the year it seems to get new pages, links, images and user generated content.  That’s why I recommend performing an annual review of your website. To help get you started and get your site in shape for the New Year, here is an Annual Website Review Checklist.

1. Review Your Domain Name Record

Don’t let outdated information cause you to miss renewals and other important notices. Verify that the contact names and addresses on your domain record are correct once a year. Use these resources to review your domain record now:

  • InterNIC[http://www.internic.net/whois.html]
  • VeriSign[http://www.networksolutions.com/en_US/whois/]

2. Check Website Email Addresses

Added new staff?  Replaced some others?  You could have invalid email addresses on your site. Make a list of all the email addresses on your site and confirm that they’re still active.

3. Update Your Confirmation and Automated Messages

If the automated messages from your registration, request, order and other forms have not been updated in the last year, it’s time to review them. These messages can be powerful customer relations tools, but only if they’re meeting your customers’ needs. Make sure your automated messages are serving your customers—not spamming them.

4. Test Your Forms

In conjunction with updating your automated messages, you should test your forms to make sure that they’re still functioning correctly—and to review how easy they are to use. Simply submit each as if you were a visitor on your site. Be sure to review your error messages as part of this process. You should test your forms often and immediately look into any sudden drops in the number of submissions.

5. Validate Your Links

Do your part to stop link rot, while improving your site, by making time to check your internal and external site links—especially if you’ve neglected this task due to more pressing demands. Here are a couple of basic tools that can help:

6. Check Your Site’s Search Feature

Like most of the items on this list, checking your site’s search feature should be done more than once a year. But we know it’s not always possible to review all aspects of your site on an ongoing basis. That’s why it’s important to make sure your search is functioning effectively and that outdated content isn’t showing up as part of your annual review.

If you don’t have a search feature on your site, now’s a good time to see if adding one would enhance your site’s usability.

7. Check Your File Sizes and Download Times

If a lot of updates and additions have been made to your site, it might be time to check your site’s performance. It’s not unusual for page and image files to slowly creep up in size with each successive update. Re-optimizing your files so your pages load faster will make for a better user experience.

8. Review Your Stylesheets, Standards, Accessibility and Compatibility

If you want to save some serious time for your visitors—and for yourself during site maintenance—the annual review is the perfect time to revisit or set site standards covering CSS, Web Standards, Accessibility and Browser Compatibility.

To help you wrestle with the issues surrounding evolving your site to new standards, we offer these articles and resources:

Web Standards

Cascading Stylesheets (CSS):

  • CSS Work from meryerweb.com[http://www.meyerweb.com/eric/css/]

Browser Stats:

9. Update Your Time References and Copyright

About Us and other background information on your site may contain specific time references such as “for five years”. Your site may also include a historical timeline or list of accomplishments that should be updated at the start of the year.

In addition, your copyright should be updated when your content is updated. During your annual review, check to make sure this task hasn’t been overlooked. Although you can simply use the date that the content was first created, it’s a good idea for your copyright to reflect when content was created and when it was modified. This is not only to protect your work, but also to avoid having visitors think that your content is out of date. Below are some examples of the syntax:

Examples:

  • Content created in 2009:
    Copyright (c) 2009 nxtConcepts, Ltd.
  • Content created in 2007 and updated in 2011:
    Copyright (c) 2007, 2011 nxtConcepts, Ltd.
  • Content created in 2007 and updated in 2009 and 2011:
    Copyright (c) 2007-2011 nxtConcepts, Ltd.

Learn More About Copyrights:

10. Check Your Search Engine Visibility

Search engines are one of the most important and cost-effective sources for attracting targeted traffic and increasing brand awareness for many sites. At the same time, many changes have taken place in how search engines return results and display paid (sponsored) listings. As a result, I check your site’s visibility on the top search engines by searching for your company name, products and other appropriate keyword phrases.

If your site isn’t coming up near the top of the results for these terms, you should look into the benefits of marketing your site through search engine optimization and paid placement: