Recently UDig.com got a bit of a refresh.  As a technology consulting company, of course we want to put our best foot forward with our site and continually review our goals and metrics.  However, no website should ever be DONE, all sites should constantly be evolving to meet changing customer expectations, show up in search rankings and stay relevant to their audiences. 

Here are the top 5 things we review for our, and our clients, ongoing website maintenance: 

Data-Driven

We always start by looking at the analytics.  How is our site traffic evolving, from what sources are visitors coming to our site and how are visitors interacting with the site?  This information gives us great insight into the current state and helps us set targets for each new release.  There is so much data available it can be challenging to understand how your site is performing – what’s most important, bounce rate or time on page, sessions or pageviews or any other myriad of metrics? By setting specific goals for each release and monitoring progress to those KPIs, we can actually measure how sites are performing over time and if we are attracting the right audiences.
Do you have key metrics for your website performance?

Targeted to Key Personas

At UDig, we have two key audiences we consider when designing our site and developing content: prospective consultants and buyers of our services. In order to design an effective site and content strategy you must know who you are writing for and we highly recommend, you must pick one!  In our case, we believe that prospective consultants care about the ways in which we partner with our clients, and it is one of the major factors in recruitment, so we focus the site on buyers of our services and the results of the work we do.  Persona development and prioritization can be challenging work but writing to a specific audience makes future work and decisions much easier.
Who is the audience for your website content? 

User-Friendly & Accessible

A site that looks great to me and navigation that makes perfect sense to the development team may not actually resonate with your visitors.  Why? As hard as it is to believe, we are not our customers and while we may have lots of great information about them, there is no substitute for asking them. Every user has a different set of expectations or mental model for how they perceive things which is built based on their own experiences.  We review sites for usability and accessibility, leveraging the latest trends in UX and conduct in-person testing sessions with users to make sure the site meets their expectations.  We have a strong focus in accessibility because if your site is not usable by all of your users you are eliminating potential customers.  For Accessibility we focus on ADA 508 compliance and WCAG 2.0 standards to ensure that our site is usable, legible and understandable for everyone.
How does your website score on accessibility? 

Modern Style

Just like fashion, web design is constantly evolving.  The hottest CSS trends even six months ago can now look dated and impact the perception of your company and its offerings.  Our designers constantly review and assess the latest trends with a particular focus on how to best engage audiences and deliver content effectively.  We test new attributes (going back to those key KPIs) to provide a quantitative assessment of design choices.  We run A/B tests on our content, develop targeted content and other personalization methods to ensure we are speaking to our audience in the way that aligns to the interaction they want. 
Is your website ‘in’ or ‘out‘ of trend? 

Future Flexibility

We firmly believe code should be built to last and adapt to changing needs.  With any software development project, we look to use modern frameworks and automation to ensure the solution is adaptable and scalable.  By deeply understanding the organization’s goals and future plans we will develop the solution that’s the right fit for them.  Custom code, CMS selection and installation or WordPress customization all can be used to build an effective site; we’ll make the recommendation for the solution that will meet your current and future needs. On our site, we have created templates that allow our marketing team to quickly adapt page layouts for new content, leverage a broad set of media in layouts and take new offerings to market with little or no development time. This allows us to be especially nimble in creating content.
Is your website futureproof?  

 We’d love your feedback on the latest iteration of UDig.com, check it out and let us know what you think.  And, if you are wondering if it’s time to do some regular maintenance or a total overhaul or your site, these five questions should help give you an indication.  We’d love to do an assessment for you and provide our recommendations.