With so many "ghost town" website on the interent it's important to keep your website looking fresh. You don't want the people who visit your website to mistakenly think you're out of business or your website isn't up to date and important. Here are 5 ways to keep your website looking fresh.
1. Create a blog
Blogs are an easy way to keep your website looking fresh because there's usually a ton of content to write on any subject. So whether you're an expert in gardening, finance or anything in between it should be easy to publish a blog at least once per month. People will notice the published date on the blog and will know you're keeping your site up to date.
If you haven't already activated the blog app in your WebStarts account you can easily do this. Just login and click on the blog panel while in the dashboard view. When the blog turns from gray to blue that means it's active and you can begin writing your first post.
2. Display the date your site was last updated
You can add a short blurb of text to the top of your home page saying when the page was last updated. If people see the date is recent they'll be more likely to engage with your content, and they'll no your website is important to your business.
With WebStarts adding a text box to a page is an easy way to convey short messages like one that shares the last time you updated your page. From the page editor view just click on the Add Text icon and enter the text on the page.
3. Share current events
If you have news and current events about your business share them on your home page. You can include short blurbs of text that talk about what's going on. Be sure to include the date so people know it's relevant.
Similar to the way you can add a text box to share a short message, you can also add text boxes with headlines, titles, and paragraphs of information. Get creative and call attention to your current event stories.
4. Link to your social media
You may not be constantly updating your website but almost everyone updates their social media. Be sure to include links to things like your Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter pages.
In the Webstarts page editor you can add a social bar to your page. The social bar contains the icons of popular social media services. You can add and remove as many social media services as you'd like and enter the links to your social media URLs.
5. Change your background image
Lastly if you're using a background or hero image try switching it out with a new one from time to time. This is a little tricky, you want to make sure the image is similar enough that your visitors realize they're on the right website but different enough so they feel like it's fresh.
Those large photos you see spanning the width of a page on a website are called Strips in WebStarts. Adding a full width strip to your home page makes it easy to swap out photos without having to change the structure of your page.