Planning for success. How to keep your website content fresh

We’ve been developing websites and helping customers develop content for well over a decade. Here, we share 3 ideas which any organisation in any market can use to help inspire the generation of new website content.

Themes are a great way to produce a series of content ideas which can run over a period of time. Two key themes to work to are:

The natural seasons of the year

• Lightweight design updates to correspond with the season e.g. updating areas of the background colour, or font colours. This doesn’t have to be widespread across the site but can focus on a particular area such as the homepage, articles, blogs or news.

• Fresh photos or videos which reflect the current season.

• Articles or blogs which tie the season in with your business or a particular product or service.

• Seasons could also provide the catalyst for a special ‘seasonal offer’ which could provide new content ideas throughout your website and indeed your wider communication channels.

Industry cycles

• If your industry has clearly defined cycles, these can provide a great series of regular themes and a strategic backdrop to your website content. Interviews with employees or industry experts, articles, blogs, thought led pieces can all be outputs of a particular phase in an industry cycle and provide a fresh and interesting perspective for your customers.

• Using industry cycles as a theme could also give you the opportunity to showcase a particular product or service which is relevant to a specific time period within an industry cycle.

Organisational beliefs and passions are usually pretty unique and can form the basis of many pieces of different content which can be used on your website.

What is the mission and values of your organisation? These are often overlooked as something to be communicated outwardly, but actually using them to form the basis of content across the mix of your channels can be a rewarding exercise both internally and externally.

• On your website, content in the form of storytelling can be executed in many different ways and help provide an engaging and regular refresh. From employee and customer testimonials, interviews with people across the business through video, written pieces or podcasts, to imagery and articles. The opportunities here are extensive.

• Bringing alive your organisational mission and values as content on your website can also dovetail nicely into any internal communication that you do around them.

• Similarly, if your company has a chosen charity, or is involved in activity as part of its corporate social responsibility strategy, they can also form an interesting backdrop under which to house content and communications activity at the same time as amplifying the work that you do and the causes you support.

News is often hidden away on a website and often left out of date, but there are lots of different areas that can be considered to be newsworthy:

• New product development, service launces, staff appointments, building enhancements/office moves, team building days, events… all can be interesting content in the form of news articles for your website and provide the user an insight into your corporate world as well as boosting your SEO.

We understand that keeping your website feeling fresh can be quite daunting. However, a website isn’t something to be launched and left. It should be viewed as something organic which evolves over time to continually meet the needs of your business. Content is a key part of this and is why Google uses updated content as one of its key metrics when ranking results. Aside from the metrics, a website should be an interesting space for users to visit, reflect who you are as a business and why a customer should choose you, making it a vital element in any marketing and communications strategy. But it’s no easy task and lack of regular ideas means that it often gets overlooked for months or even years. We hope this article has helped to inspire fresh content for your website.

We are Olamalu, Drupal experts and experienced web developers. We’re a friendly and down to earth team based in West Oxfordshire, who work together to achieve brilliant outcomes. We’ve been building websites and designing tailormade tech solutions including apps for a huge range of different challenges for over 10 years. We work alongside clients and really get under the skin of the business, understanding not just what is needed now, but also how to plan ahead and consider the business needs in the future.