When the New Year is upon you, as a website owner you should double check a few things and make sure your site is ready for the New Year. Just like work around the house, your site deserves to have a New Year’s makeover to make room for all that’s in store in the upcoming year. The following are a few good tips to cleaning up your site for the New Year.
Fix your copyright dates
Make sure to change all copyright dates on your site to the New Year. This might also help you to remember to renew any licenses that you have for the New Year as well. This is very important to fix the dates because an old out dated date may seem more untrustworthy for your site. A simple php solution is to just echo the year: <?php echo date(“Y”); ?>
Renew your content
A new year is a good time to start fresh with everything. Take some time to go through all your site has to offer. Make sure your links are still working and any that are not get fixed. Is there out dated material including the old previous year that needs edited? Make sure to go over everything for any typos, or out dated information.
Double check all your links
When you are renewing all your content that is the perfect time to check out all the links on your site. Make sure you fix any broken links and those that send customers to 404 or other error pages. There are a few different sites that can help you to tell if there are any broken links on your site, such as Google Webmaster Central, or Link Checker.
Remove any old images
Make sure to remove any holiday images, or those that are outdated. This will help to give your site a new clean look, and make it appear more trustworthy and kept up.
Check your site statistics
You should really take a look over your site statistics often. This can help to give you an idea of what type of viewership or customer base your website has already. This can also help to give you an idea of what pages are being viewed more often on your site so you can learn to utilize this information on the other pages.
Update any listings
If you have local listings or others listed in a directory on your site. Now is the perfect time to recheck all those to make sure they are current and none are outdated. A good service to help with this is GetListed.org.
New Design
What better time to give your site a new looks then the New Year? It’s important to give a fresh look to your site to help keep your current viewership to show you are always updating and keeping track of your site. And by creating a new look you can even help attract a new viewership.