Kieran Cooper offers some tips for successful website maintenance.
There can be few arts organisations that don?t have a website these days. However, there are a number of questions that everyone should ask in order to ensure their sites meet key objectives. Who is the site aimed at? Is it giving them what they need? How frequently are they visiting? Which bits of the site do they use?
The first key principle of the Internet is that things change faster than in the real world. This obviously applies in a technological sense but is also true of users? expectations of websites and we ignore these at our peril. Every organisation needs to invest time in finding out how its website is used, and take the opportunity to make appropriate changes.
Thankfully, unlike many other areas of marketing, it is relatively easy to examine information about a website. The most basic set of information to analyse is the web server log that records every request for information and where it comes from. You will probably be able to get some high-level analysis from your Internet Service Provider, but to get more detail you?ll need some software (such as 123 Log Analyzer or WebTrends) and access to the raw log files from your server. Using this method you?ll be able to see exactly how many visitors have been to your site over a period of time, the pages they viewed, and how long they stayed on the site. There are some caveats to the figures but the analysis will still be able to tell you a great deal and you?ll be able to monitor the effects of any changes you make.
The Arts Marketing Association recently published the results of a pilot project to establish benchmarks for the websites of a wide range of arts organisations (http://www.a-m-a.co.uk/bench.asp). One of the most interesting findings was how few organisations were actually able to analyse their server logs. Many companies are missing a real opportunity to find out about the behaviour of visitors to the site.
It is also very easy to set up surveys on a website and to ask visitors about themselves and their opinions of what you offer. Customers who have a good relationship with your organisation will often be very happy to give you their thoughts ? often they are just waiting to be asked. As long as the survey is only available for short periods of time, so that regular visitors aren?t continually being asked to complete it, you should be able to get some qualitative comments to go alongside the numerical results from the server log analysis.
This quantitative and qualitative analysis must be underpinned by frequent internal reconsideration of the objectives for the site, and whether these objectives are being properly met. However difficult it may be for organisations to set aside time to do this, because of the rate of change it is essential to think hard about how a site is working. It may be that it needs a complete overhaul (it?s no accident that the best sites on the web are changed every two years or so) but it may also be that a few tweaks will keep it fresh.
Above all, what you most need in order to evaluate your website is a good and up-to-date understanding of what is happening on the web in general ? what sort of designs look best, how technology is being used and so on. And this really isn?t difficult ? what better justification can there be for those idle hours of surfing?
Kieran Cooper is a Director of the arts management consultancy Catalyst Arts.
t: 01225 340 340;
e: kieran@catalystarts.com;
w: http://www.catalystarts.com
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