More Website Madness

People seemed to enjoy yesterday's post on arts marketing websites, so here are few more riffs:

1.  Give your audience what they need first.  People come to our site with these basic questions:

-  What's show is going on now?

-  What's the show about?

-  How can I buy tickets?

So we try to give them all the information as quickly and cleanly as we can on the first page they see.  Now if they want to know more about some aspect of the theatre there are plenty of links they can click on to get that sort of thing . . . but first things first.

2.  Designate an updater.  You should have someone on your team who has, as part of their job duties, the responsibility to update the website.  Don't give the responsibility to everyone in the company . . . pick one person and hold them accountable. 

Also, make sure that person understands how often they should update the website.  Daily?  Weekly?  Monthly?  Whatever.  Just have a schedule and stick to it.

3.  Don't be lazy.  Fix typos on your site quickly (and trust me, you have some).  Remove broken links as soon as you are aware of them.  Your website is a public face of your work.

Update:  Ed weighs in with a cautionary tale (from the comments):

This is a topic near and dear to my heart of late. I have to say one crucial caveat here is that when you dedicate one person to be your appointed website updater, *always* make sure there's at least one other person in the org with the access and knowledge to also update the site if necessary! My org is learning this the hard way right now- Unfortunately the one person in our org who is currently able to modify our website has completely flaked out.

We have a benefit this weekend and no info on our site about it (we've had to do all of our promotion via email blast and facebook) because we can't get a hold of him (he's remotely located so we can't even lie in wait outside his apartment...like I said, learning the hard way). In the long term we'll fix this, but in the short term our company is getting screwed.

Comments

[Ed]

This is a topic near and dear to my heart of late. I have to say one crucial caveat here is that when you dedicate one person to be your appointed website updater, *always* make sure there's at least one other person in the org with the access and knowledge to also update the site if necessary! My org is learning this the hard way right now- Unfortunately the one person in our org who is currently able to modify our website has completely flaked out. We have a benefit this weekend and no info on our site about it (we've had to do all of our promotion via email blast and facebook) because we can't get a hold of him (he's remotely located so we can't even lie in wait outside his apartment...like I said, learning the hard way). In the long term we'll fix this, but in the short term our company is getting screwed.

[Tony]

an old company I was with had the same problem.

The AD and the webdesigner severed all ties between the two and the designer took all the web stuff. So they had to wait to re-register the domain after it expired, and start from scratch.

[Ed]

In this case I don't think there's anything rancorous going on, it's just a case of us not really being a priority anymore. So I have high hopes of getting responsibilities trasferred amicably. If we can just get him to answer his phone or email! Keep your fingers crossed for us.

[Tony]

Ed, is it a matter of not having know how? or not having access to make changes?

[Ed]

Both, but mostly access. None of us are super web savvy, but our site is simple enough that I'm positive I could manage if I could get behind the scenes. I mean we're talking html not Sanskrit. I'm peeved because the guy promised he'd get several of us in the company set up with logins and a wysiwyg editor before he left town...and that hasn't materialized (I'm not very tech savvy- apologies if the last couple of sentences make me sound like an idiot).