There’s No Respite When It Comes to Running a Website*

If you own or run a website, there truly is no time for you to ever to stop giving precedence to it. Websites need constant love and affection. They need to always be tended to and bettered where they can be. They need full devotion, at all times.

As a website owner you need not only be doing this, but you also need to be going even further than the extra mile when it comes to your site. You need to go beyond, way beyond the HTML and CSS. You need to actively add interactivity to your site. Be your own SEO expert. You need implement slides. Animations. Lightboxes. Form validation. The lot! You need to be willing to add all of these things and more — well, that’s if you want your site to be a success. And in order to be able to add all of these things, you are going to need to take some serious JavaScript training. When you do, you will equip yourself with all the Java tools needed to make your site stand out on the world wide web. And that’s what it’s about: standing out. You need to have all of the traffic that heads to your site leave it with etched in their memory. If they don’t leave with anything, then they will probably not be coming back soon (or ever again).

These days you also need to keep on trend with how your website looks. Back when I first started it was all about colour, patterns and everything accessible from the very first page, but recently there has been a rise in web design simplicity. Monochrome layouts with bold text that is readable across all formats is often key to a website’s success. This means the images that are used really stand out as the website’s design doesn’t take anything away from what is being show. It’s important that the website is also easy to navigate and clear to understand, there is nothing worse if you go to a site and can’t find what you’re looking for.

And another way to scare off potential viewers on your site is to allow your site to go down. If a casual viewer clicks on your site and sees that it is not working — for whatever reason — they will simply click straight back off it. Why would they waste their time waiting for a website to load? Would you? No. So you need to ensure your site is up and working at all times — day and night. There are a few ways to do this. One way is to sit watching your site throughout the whole day and night. That, however, is just not going to happen. A far more realistic way to do this, then, is to use an uptime service, such as UptimeRobot. This kind of technological service will watch your site at all times for you. It will then alert you to the fact that your site has gone down or has crashed, if it ever does so. This means that you could then, quickly, tend to your stricken site and nurse it back to health again.

If you are a mummy or daddy to a little baby website, then there is truly no time for you to ever take a respite. You have to be constantly working on it to ensure it is keeping its finger on the pulse of the latest trends and cutting-edge technologies. You need to be constantly bettering it so that it never becomes stale. Yes, there is never a time, as a website owner, to ever rest on your laurels. So, head out into the big world wide web. Create a website. Nurture it. Tend to it. But most of all, love it! Because whenever anybody that clicks on your site can see that the site is being loved, they are more than likely going to remain on it.