Just as our bodies need refreshment on a regular basis to remain nourished and able, our minds need the same refreshment - preferably on a constant basis. When we visit a website, our minds will have already digested what is on offer after very few visits. The same is true of television, magazines and books; our brains just want more and more new material to digest. When you create a website, you cannot expect that it is going to be the center of attention for very long unless you can supply content that will challenge your visitors or provide continuing mental fodder for them to chew upon. Whether you sell products or services, constantly providing new information is important if you want people to stay interested.
Rotate your poor selling products and make them interesting again.
If you sell products, you can rotate a key product, perhaps a slow mover, to a prime place on your home page and provide some extra information about why it might be a good buy; you can discount slow movers to make them more appealing and use this to guide people toward those products that you need to sell. This ever-changing face to your home page is what website visitors expect to find.
Offer relevant industry updates.
If you are selling services, it is not so likely that you will have new products all the time but there may well be areas of your expertise that you can write about. So you can keep adding to your site perhaps providing your visitors with up-to-date information about your industry. You can describe the latest processes or techniques, or new materials - anything that will keep your visitors interested. There are ways to use your website builder to ensure that you can make these regular updates without going back to square one every time and having to create a website from scratch.
Your home page will obviously need to have some static information that will not change; your contact information, an introduction to who you are maybe and some of the navigation links. What you can add is a navigation button or bar that has your latest updates, offers or new information, with an associated text panel that has short description of the new content. When the button or link has been selected, another page or a pop-up can appear containing the main thrust of your new content or special offer. Always make it easy for your visitors to close these pop-ups or web pages, as it is irritating for them not to be able to navigate quickly back to the home page when they realize that your new item is not of interest.
Brevity is the soul of wit.
In general, the best advice is to keep your updates short and to the point, unless there is an inherent need for the material you add to be verbose. If you are just using the same page to rotate your special offers, then the page you create will be approximately the same size and over time, your site will not expand in size. If, on the other hand you keep adding content, you are quickly going to have a large site with a rapidly expanding number of pages and links. The problem with this situation is that to have them indexed properly by search engines you will have to keep updating your sitemaps and keywords too. The additional burden on your menu systems can also mean you end up with so many sidebar links and menu items, your website will become a bewildering place to navigate.
Keep it as simple as you can.
You are not competing in the “I have the most words for you to read” contest so be concise and delete your outdated pages when they are no longer relevant. When you make a website, include into the design layout the ability for you to grow your site and add more material - whether written or media. If you do have a lot to offer and you are adding to it all the time, index it properly and utilize archiving features whereby you can move all the less frequently requested items to a separate listing of links. People searching for specifics will have the patience to search through an archive. The average visitor only wants to see the latest additions, so organize your website in order that you create a flow around your static data. This flow will be the addition of new material and the effective archiving (or deletion) of the old.
When it comes to arranging your content, always remember to “go with the flow” - and remember your visitors can only do this if you provide the conduit.
