When I wake up on a Saturday morning and I’m in the mood for pancakes, I don’t go to the YellowPages to find diner listings—I go to Google to find and compare menus. When I back my car into a tree and need someone to pop the dent out, I don’t spend a year watching the newspaper for ads—I go to Google to find a deal. The point: it’s darned near impossible to own a business these days without also owning a website. Trouble is, a lot of business owners think that “owning a website” means jiggering two or three pages together and then never touching them again (or worse, paying good money for a professional-looking site and then failing to keep it updated). Successful websites are not static—they are tweaked, updated, and retooled so they don’t get stale. Successful websites are, in a word, managed, and if you follow these simple site-management musts, your website will continue looking as shiny as it did the day it rolled off the development server.
          
You must check for broken links and programming errors regularly.
Arguably nothing is more frustrating to a site visitor than clicking on an interesting link only to find that it’s broken, or trying to leave feedback and discovering indecipherable code where the form should be. Successful site management means making sure your site continues to work as it is was designed to do.

You must keep things consistent and up-to-date.
Consider this: It’s 1999 and a toy store is about to launch its very first website that’s full of bright colors, beveled buttons, animated graphics, and frames.  Around this time, the toy store staff gets tickets to an advanced screening of Star Wars Episode 1 and decides to post a picture on the homepage of the store owners standing outside the theater in full Jedi uniform. Website visitors think the toy store is trendy, and customers flock to it to get their hands on Darth Maul action figures.

Now it’s 2009: the site’s colors are still bright, the buttons are still beveled (except for the new one that was tacked on when the Wii was released in 2005), the graphics are still spinning, the frames are still frames, and that Episode 1 picture is still on the homepage. Website visitors think Jar Jar Binks was annoying; they want the U.S.S. Enterprise collectible ship. They wonder if you are even still in business. They go somewhere with more modern offerings. Successful site management means making sure your pictures, content, and design are contemporary and consistent so that your customers stick around.

You must freshen up the content.
Soon after a site is launched, a search engine’s web crawlers will visit and scan the content for keywords. The crawlers will come back again in about a week, but if they don’t read anything new, they won’t come back again for two weeks. Then four, then eight, then sixteen. If you announce a promotion during week nine, the search engines (and, by extension, potential customers) won’t know about it until nearly two months later. However, if a site manager regularly adds or tweaks content, s/he gives the crawlers a reason to come back more often, so that when a promotion announcement is launched, web searchers have a chance to find it before it ends. Successful site management means making sure the web crawlers are always coming back for more.

You must find out how pages are performing.
You may sell dog biscuits, table linens, and souvenir shot glasses in your shop around the corner, but if website visitors are devouring the pages you’ve devoted to treats and ignoring everything else, you know some parts of your website are not pulling their weight. Successful site management means monitoring the site’s performance and taking steps to improve it.  

You must not overpay for site management.
Theoretically, anyone can be a site manager. However, website management is not easy task, and your current staff is already busy enough, which means you’d probably have a hire a new person with the right technical and creative credentials just to keep up with the website. That person will expect a salary, insurance, a 401k, paid vacation, and maybe even your first born son. That person will also expect to be paid for the time s/he spends learning about your website management system. A professional, on the other hand, will expect nothing more than a comparatively low monthly or yearly maintenance fee. And (added bonus!) since s/he will likely already have web management experience, all you’ll pay for is service.

Your website is a marketing tool. You wouldn’t let the same television ads and radio spots run indefinitely, so why would you let time wear away an idle website? Don’t allow your website to fail your business: get someone to manage it, stat!