Often the most confusing thing about running a website is knowing what to do first. With so much to do, and without a clear set of priorities, you can end up devoting too much attention to things that don’t matter and completely forget the things that do. But if you have your priorities in order and adhere to them, there is zero chance you will fall victim to this common pitfall. At the end of the day, it’s a very liberating feeling to know you have’t forgotten anything important.
So how do you know what your priorities are? Over the years I’ve developed the following rules for managing websites. Remember, these are general rules I use to dictate the order in which I perform site-related tasks; my specific rule is that people who really know their business can get away with shifting the order from time to time, with one caveat: Rules 1,2, and 3 must always come first.
- Backups – Most people roll their eyes at the thought of backups, and there’s no way of reminding someone about this without seeming preachy; but most people also seem to forget about their backups, so I’m putting this at number one on the list because it is so critical. I can’t stress this enough: if you fail to do you backups, sooner or later you will lose everything you’ve built. Everything. Backups are easy to do, and they can and should be largely automated. There’s no reason to take this shortcut.
- Security – A close second to backups is security. If there’s one thing that people think about even less, it’s this. In a nutshell, solid security is keeping the site safe from those unauthorized to use it, and also from unauthorized alterations or defacements. It’s a complicated topic, but it begins with keeping your server and your software updated to the latest versions. (For a cautionary tale on this subject, see how Robert Scoble lost parts of his blog due to a security flaw in WordPress and also how he didn’t have backups.)
- Monitoring – Monitoring your site means knowing whether its up or down at all times. Waiting to hear about downtime from your customers is not a monitoring strategy. Keeping tabs on your site is absolutely critical, and it’s yet another task that can be automated. Pingdom is a great and inexpensive solution for your monitoring.
- Customer Service - Building traffic to your site and translating that traffic into customers or repeat visitors is hard work, and every time you accomplish the next sale or the next regular visitor you’re enhancing the level of trust between you and the visitor. Why on earth would you want to do anything to jeopardize that trust-based relationship? Getting people to give you their trust is hard work; regaining their trust after you’ve lost it is nearly impossible. Take care of your customers and visitors and they will take care of you.
- Creating New Content - Adding more content to your site will give it the kind of depth required to bring visitors back again and again. If you run an e-commerce store that means making sure you carry all the items your customers are likely to want; if you run a blog, it means writing the kinds of blog posts that your readers appreciate. It all adds up to giving people more of what it is that brought them to you in the first place.
- Traffic Building – It makes absolutely no sense to build traffic until you have a site worth visiting, so if you haven’t really done your best on #5, stop right there and keep at it until you’re certain. Then, and only then, will your efforts at building traffic pay off. Why bother building traffic to a site that doesn’t have anything to attract visitors and, more importantly, retain them once they’ve stopped by? But once you have that solid base of content, it’s time to get busy building traffic to your site with advertising, affiliate program, search engine optimization (SEO), commenting on other blogs, etc.
- Site Enhancements – The urge to tinker with a site’s design and functionality is so powerful that it’s almost irresistible, and site design often get the blame when a site is performing poorly. But in my experience this is rarely the real cause. In fact, I’ve seen sites that were terribly designed do extremely well despite being ugly and counterintuitive. MySpace is a good example of this; though now fading in popularity, it continues to be one of the hottest properties on the Internet despite an almost comically bad user interface. How is it that MySpace does so well despite looking like something designed by a second-grader? The answer is traffic, traffic, traffic. And the traffic keeps coming because MySpace has something people want, something that makes them overlook those glaring design deficiencies. When performing site evaluations, one of the very first questions I’m asked is whether I believe a redesign will improve the site’s performance. I respond with a question: How much a traffic are you getting? If the answer is, “not much,” then a redesign is a waste of time. Why bother redesigning something that people aren’t visiting to begin with? In short, whether your site looks like the Mona Lisa or a kindergarten art project, it doesn’t really matter until you have a solid base of visitors.
- Everything Else – This is my catch-all category, the one in which you do whatever it is that you want to do. It’s here to show that whatever it is you’re planning to do needs to come after everything else. Always.
I’ve used these priorities for many years, on sites ranging from small to huge. Rarely have I found a good reason for diverging from the order of things as I’ve described them. You may find peace of mind if you apply them yourself.
