6 Strategies for Making Website Management Simpler

After your website launches, you'll be responsible for managing that website. That means you'll be responsible for producing, publishing, and editing content, monitoring traffic, and taking care of issues as they arise. This can be both time consuming and complicated, but there are many strategies that can make website management simpler.

Choose the Right CMS

One of the most important things you can do to make your life easier as a website manager is to choose the right content management system (CMS). It's tempting to think of all CMS platforms as being functionally identical; but even though many of these platforms serve the same high level functions, most of them have a variety of unique strengths and weaknesses you'll need to consider before adopting them. Some of these platforms are going to be much more intuitive and easier to learn than others, and some of them are going to be much more flexible and easier to scale.

Umbraco, for example, is a robust CMS platform best known for making website management simpler for B2B companies. In addition to being highly intuitive and easy to implement, the platform offers enough flexibility and agility to accommodate even the most complex and ambitious businesses in the space.

With the right CMS platform in place, half the potential issues that could stand between you and convenient website management are going to disappear.

Hire the Right People

Next, it's important to hire the right people and give them clear roles and responsibilities. If you're managing the website entirely by yourself, you can skip over this point. But if you plan on growing your website eventually, sooner or later, you'll need to figure out a way to expand your team.

Who are the right people? That partially depends on your organization and its unique culture. But good website management candidates have experience, good time management skills, attention to detail, and enough adaptability to handle whatever comes their way.

When preparing a person for a role in website management, avoid generalities. Instead, be very specific about what this person's core responsibilities are going to be and what they can do to be successful in the role. The more education, training, and guidance you provide, the more seamless the website management side of things is going to flow.

Create a Consistent System for Content Management

Content management is a big part of website management, and arguably the most time consuming component. Accordingly, you can set yourself up for success by creating a system for content management to which you can consistently adhere.

Any system of content management should include protocols for the following:

Planning and tracking:What current pages do you have? What pages do you need in the future? What are your future plans for publishing content?

Creation:Who creates draft content and how and where do they create it? How do you approach pages and posts that require collaboration between multiple parties?

Review:Who is responsible for reviewing content and what are the standards they need to follow?

Scheduling:How far in advance should you schedule content and how should you coordinate scheduling?

Publication and future:How do you support content once it's published and how often do you review and update it in the future?

Establish and Document Key Workflows

Next, establish and formally document key workflows necessary for website management. What steps should your employees follow and in what order? Who is responsible for what? What kind of troubleshooting processes should they follow and when?

Formally documenting these workflows forces you to think through the process in a logical way, gives employees something tangible they can refer to if they have questions, and establishes a basis for future evaluations.

Monitor and Analyze Web Traffic Regularly

On a regular basis, you should monitor and analyze your web traffic. Pay attention not only to pure numbers but also use your behavioral patterns; by aggregating these data, you can form better conclusions about which types of content are performing best, which areas of your website need improvement, and which pages should be further supported or cut.

Automate What You Can

It's easy to see the value of automation, but many businesses are reluctant to employ it, even when it's relatively simple to do so. Automation reduces the need for manual effort and improves consistency simultaneously, so even if you're only automating simple tasks like reporting on web traffic, it's worth incorporating.

Keep in mind that improving your approach to website management is going to require some ongoing review and future updating. As you learn more about the dynamics of your website and target audience, you'll discover more opportunities for improving efficiency and performance.

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