|
Tips
for Maintaining a Home Page
Kishore C.S.
September 1999
I have been
maintaining an intranet homepage for more than a year. I have also started
maintaining personal home page on Internet at Rediff.
It is a wonderful
idea to create a homepage and have
a ‘web-presence’.
Updating home page frequently and keeping it ‘current’ is a
challenge. If a visitor to your homepage discovers that the periodic updates
have not happened for more than a few months, the visitor may loose interest in
the homepage.
The following are
some tips to managing and maintaining a personal homepage:
-
Plan your home page
layout and organization
-
Define categories
for the content you would like to publish.
-
Use good background
or theme.
-
Gather information
needed for the homepage in advance.
-
Plan ways of
informing users of updates to your homepage.
-
Maintain What’s
New Section OR Put ‘New’ Tags to new items/links added.
-
Anticipate profile
of visitors and word the content in a way that appeals to everyone.
-
Have some pictures
to improve impact on the pages. Only text looks dumb.
-
Make continuous
improvements to pages – Layout, organization, quality of content.
-
Maintain Quality of
your homepage: Check for Spelling, Grammar, Proper Links.
-
Analyze usefulness
of your homepage. What factor will drive visitor to your site.?
-
Maintain consistency
of Fonts, Color Schemes to make it aesthetically appealing.
-
Don’t keep any
offending material on the home page
More tips....
-
Publish useful information. Information that has
long term value and information people will need again and again.
-
If you plan weekly or monthly updates, collect material well in advance and
have it ready. Visitors expect information on the specified dates. Don’t
disappoint the visitors.
-
If you anticipate international exposure to your home page ensure
that content does not have too much regional flavour and change language to
internationally acceptable language.
-
Using Counters to have an idea of how many people will visit is good.
But I see one problem with this. Even your visits get counted. You loose
track how many are genuine visits from outsiders. Knowing number of visitors
will keep you motivated.
-
Ask for feedback from Visitors. Take their
suggestions and incorporate them. You gain loyalty and publicity.
-
Sorting Information in Chronological Order makes it easier for
visitors to read the most recent information.
Use the above tips to
make your homepage a page that everyone loves to visit. Keep an eye for the good
features of sites when you browse internet. It must been incorporated based on
some feedback or drive to improve. Learn Fast. You will have good experience in
improving and maintaining the website.
Tell me how you feel
about these tips. Write to me at mailto:cskishore@yahoo.com
. Your feedback is important to me. Thank you.
| 
