In the old days of retail business, before the internet opened up the opportunity to all and sundry, “taking care of the shop” was a central part of running any kind of retail store. From a 7/11 toa department store, the storefront needs to be arranged, the products attractively displayed around the store, the floors cleaned, the windows washed, and so on.
And it might come as a surprise that store maintenance is not something the ecommerce revolution has done away with it. Ecommerce has, just like everything else, moved it online.
In ecommerce, your website is your store, and store maintenance is website maintenance. Maintenance implies ongoing work, and this is perhaps the most important thing to remember – a website should be dynamic, not static.
If an ecommerce site is just an inert website, it is unlikely to perform well. If your ecommerce website is, however, constantly updating its blog, releasing new products, offering multiple calls-to-action, and so on, it is much more likely to attract traffic. The internet rewards activity. Google tends not to return websites upon which there is nothing going on.
A good active ecommerce website is one that is constantly posting some type of content, preferably SEO optimized. It is also one that is actually doing business and responding well to shifts in order load. A good website is also one that is connected to a network of marketing material or alternative sales platforms scattered across the web.
In other words, a good website needs to be dynamic, interacting with users across the web, drawing visitors to the website, and ultimately turning those visitors into customers. And, as you might expect, this is something that takes constant website maintenance.
What is Website Maintenance?
Many assume that website maintenance is a job for the IT professionalsand involves lot of coding, tinkering with server, and managing the website to handle ever increasing numbers of customers. That’s certainly part of it, but it goes far beyond that.
Website maintenance implies constant website activity. It’s again helpful to think of website maintenance as an online equivalent of old-fashioned store management. All the technical stuff is the cleaning and physical upkeep of the store building, but maintenance also involves releasing new products, presenting them attractively, and designing the storefront.There is a lot of creativity involved, too.
Online, this means launching new products, creating clever marketing tactics, and responding dynamically to the ever-changing fortunes of the business.
For example, if you release a whole new product category, then you will probably need a new page on the site, with all the attendant SEO content in the form of product descriptions and pictures. You might then decide to release some new blog posts that are relevant to your new products, and you might decide to create a marketing campaign for them that ultimately leads back to your site. This is what is meant by ecommerce website maintenance.
In-House Or Outsourced?
Azola Creative, a company offering lead generation services and website design, say that one of the investment landmarks a company will make as they expand is to outsource website maintenance. This means more than just handling the technical side of things. The whole way you aesthetically present new products or content can be outsourced to a web designer, you can hire a blog writer, and so on.
But website maintenance can also be done in-house, and it isn’t always necessary to outsource website maintenance straightaway. Certainly though, specialist expertise will be required eventually.
By that point, however, your company is already well on its way.
