By Mitch “Mr. Organization” Keeler

Not many of you might of realized that yesterday was the first day of Spring. That means that soon the birds will start chirping, the grass will turn green and summer will be coming up pretty quickly. So as with any other Spring tradition, it is now time to start thinking about Spring cleaning.

How do you do spring cleaning with your web site though? Well here are ten spring cleaning tips for your web site or online business that might help you get started.

1. Update Any Scripts and Plugins – Look at WordPress, Joomla and any other scripts or services you have installed and see if it is time to give them an upgrade. You should be doing this more often than every spring but now is a good time to check and make sure.
2. Do Your E-mail Addresses Work? – I recently got an e-mail from a friend who told me, “Sorry I didn’t get back to you I just figured out I had major problems with my e-mail account”. Send yourself a dummy message to make sure you don’t fall into the same boat.
3. Clean up Your Sidebars – This ‘bit of advice would be mainly for blogs. I have seen some people become really addicted to having sidebar widgets and gadgets. If you have more than five per sidebar, might be time to ditch some or at least make them look pretty again.
4. Review your Terms of Service – Make sure your terms of service and acceptable use policy are up to date and include everything you wish to include there. You may have made some changes to your web site and business since the last time you reviewed it so check it out now to make sure all your bases are still covered.
5. Check and Update your Sitemaps – If you have a Google Webmaster Tools account, it might be a good time to login and check to make sure Google didn’t find any errors, which would keep them from indexing certain parts of your web site.
6. Is Your Contact Information Correct? – Check out your contact page and make sure that the numbers, e-mail addresses and postal addresses listed there are up to date and show the correct information.
7. Renew Your Domains – When does your domain name run out of date? Might need to check and also be sure that you have all your hosting bills paid up too. This also makes for a good time to upgrade your hosting account to one with a few more perks.
8. Test Your Web Site Links – Are all your web site links working? Check your error logs in your various stats packages to see where people are finding 404s and try to fix all the broken links or non-existent pages you can find.
9. How Out of Date is Your “About Us” Section? – Checking out my own about us page on one of my other web sites I see I pretty much haven’t updated it since the launch of the site. Always good to keep this up to date because well, this is how people lean more about you and what you do.
10. Spellcheck Your Web Site Content – How many grammar errors can you find on your web site? If you don’t want to read through everything you have posted – you might try just going through a few of the most popular ones and making sure they are correct. Bad spelling really peeves some people, so best not to get on anybody’s bad side.

Have any more suggestion? Be sure to leave a comment to share with the rest of us.

Related Tips and Tricks:

• Keep Your WordPress Plugins Up To Date
• Web Hosting Forums Get a New Design
• Take Better Web Site Captures with WebSnapshot

This entry was posted on Friday, March 21st, 2008 at 6:14 am and is filed under Customer Service, Design, Mitch Keeler, Web Host Support. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS feed . Comments are currently closed.