Sometimes it’s the little things that can add up to make a big difference. We all know this to be true in life—and at the very same time, it holds resoundingly true with websites too. Here are 5 simple ways to make your website just a little bit better in just 5 minutes (or less):
1. Clean up your text.
Copy a page of text from your website, paste it into your word processing software of choice and give it a quick once-over. Look for blatant errors and be sure to run spell check to catch any mistakes that might have been overlooked. Clean it up, and then copy & paste it back into your site.
2. Reformat a web page.
Again, regarding the text content on a page, sometimes just reformatting a body of text can be a significant improvement. Read through it aloud, and as you read, be sure to break up the paragraphs into short, web-friendly paragraphs. Add a few bold headlines to break up the body of text. Use bold here and there to highlight the features or benefits mentioned throughout. Finally, ensure that the entire body of content is perfectly consistent—in other words, if one paragraph is indented to start with, shouldn’t they all be? It’s amazing what a little bit of attention to detail & consistency can do for a web page.
3. Add a link/Ask for a link.
Know of a great website that would really help your visitors? If so, why not take a minute and link to that site from one of your site’s resource pages or even within a recent blog post? Share the love. And while you’re at it, go ahead and ask that site for a link back if they would be so kind (no strings attached, though). Reciprocal linking has gotten kind of a bum rap lately in the SEO guru circles, but when it’s visitor-centric, it can only stand to help.
4. Add a stock photo to a page or post.
A picture is worth a thousand words. Subscribe to a stock photo site and grab a few really high quality images to spice up your site with. Using just the right image prominently within your next blog post or on one of your top web pages can really help to bring out the message of that page. The best part? It literally only takes a couple of minutes to add an image to a page. (When using a good CMS…don’t have a content management system? WSpider can help you with this.)
5. Create a new page or post.
If you really know your stuff, creating a short but fresh new blog post might just take you 5 minutes or so. Adding new content to your site on a regular basis is essential to ongoing success. So even if you can only commit 5 minutes a day to this strategy, then at least at the end of the week you can have one new piece of content ready to upload to your site.
5 minutes sure doesn’t seem like a much time at all. But the bottom line is that sometimes this is all the time we can squeeze out of a day—make it worthwhile. Each small improvement you make to your website will have a cumulative snowball effect on your site’s long term success.
