You’ll hear just about every business consultant encourage their clients to put up a good website to represent their company, since this can greatly improve their brand presence in the marketplace and can attract all sorts of new clients into their fold. Some companies go about this the right way, expanding their online presence with Twitter and Facebook pages too. That’s good.

However, there are countless other companies that go about this in entirely the wrong way. They may have launched a website ten years ago for their restaurant, floral shop, or any other kind of store, but they fail to keep it up-to-date with new information. I’ve been to a few restaurant websites that look like they belong on Geocities from a design standpoint. That’s not good.

To make matters worse, clicking on the link for “this month’s specials” can sometimes direct me to a page for the specials for May 2007. Ironically, some of these specials are still applicable, but the page explicitly mentions that they are from May 2007. That’s not good at all. If you are going to have dated material on your site, ensure that it is kept up to date. Otherwise, place more general information on the site that can be more “evergreen” in nature.

A great way to keep the site updated with minimal effort is to have general background information about your company and the products or services it offers, but to have a company blog section as well that can be updated with a brief post every week or two. This keeps the site fresh and helps from a search engine optimization standpoint too.