It is one thing to have a great site - but it is another to keep people wanting to come back to it! So how do you keep people interested?

Depending on your time, your commitment and the subject of your site, you should consider updating it at least once after you initially upload it! If you don't, then what is the point of you even having a site? There will always be something that is out of date almost immediately after you upload it; that's the nature of information! If the page were about you, wouldn't you want to let people know if you had a new addition to the family? Even if your page was just a review of some product or service, even a tutorial... other factors beyond your control will make something out of date; you can almost guarantee it!

Keeping your Site Alive

It would be a very good idea to visit your own site as it is online from time to time, as while you are able to check on the changes you have made to the site on your hard drive (assuming that you are building your site offline to upload later), you can not check your external hyperlinks while you are offline! Also there is no other way to make sure that you have uploaded all your changes and that the new site features are working as expected; because if you don't find your mistakes, your visitors certainly will! (although they may not tell you about any problems they encounter).

I would recommend that you visit all links at least every three months, just to weed out those who have moved or changed their name or nature of the site. (Geocities sites are prone to changing owners, so I'd be extra vigilant with those!) Don't think that link checking has to be a chore of owning a site; there are ways you can reduce the problem of broken links without having to spend a full day doing checks.

1. Keep your links list small - which makes it much easier for you to check them all on a regular basis and easier on your visitors for choosing where to go next

2. Break up the task - it's much easier to check say 5 links a day than checking a full page at the weekend.

3. Automate the task - there are Perl scripts and programs to highlight broken links, so you just need make sure that the links really are broken and remove them accordingly

Winds of Change

Also it wouldn't hurt to add or change any sections from time to time; even a change of design and color scheme can work wonders to a site where the traffic flow is starting to dwindle. People don't want to visit your site online time and time again if they get the same old thing; they may just find it easier to save the pages for offline viewing! Change is what keeps people coming back to a site!

While making changes to your site can be a good thing, it can also be rather bad in the longer term. Let me explain. Say for example that your site has a theme about it (rather like our simple color scheme here), and people visiting have gotten used to the theme... then you get bored of it and put up a notice saying that you are remodeling, locking visitors out of the site until the new theme is finished. When you open up, you have a totally new look, which isn't even slightly similar to the old one. What happens next?

1. Regular visitors to your site will know you've changed the theme, so no problem there

2. New visitors will not have seen the old site, so there is no problem there either

3. And what about the occasional visitor? The site looks nothing like the old one, everything has been restructured and renamed and the only thing that is the same is the site name (although some owners change that too!) They may get confused for a while, until they work out what has happened.

So what? It's your site and you can do what you want with it! How very true, but if you are constantly changing the site beyond all recognition whenever you get bored with it, your site will never have a true identity!

Remember - on the Internet, change is always good for maintaining your audience . . . so humor them from time to time with something new, different and interesting! Just be careful that you don't overdo it... a little change and often is the best way to make a dramatic change at the site without confusing your visitors.

The author, Rosemarie Wise, is a self proclaimed "web enthusiast" who set up her site, Web Site Owner, to share her experiences of being a site owner.