A Website Task List for January

Ordered by return, not by appeal

Most website lists are ordered by what is interesting, which puts a redesign near the top and a form test near the bottom.

Ordered by what actually returns something, the sequence reverses almost entirely.

The first three items below are worth more than everything after them combined, and they take about two hours.

The rest are genuine improvements that most small businesses should skip until the first three are done and have been done again.

The three that matter

• Test the enquiry form and confirm it arrives.
• Check the site on a phone, on mobile data.
• Answer the question customers ask most.

The first fails silently more often than anything else on a small site, produces no error, and can cost months of enquiries before anybody notices. It takes two minutes and should be done monthly rather than annually.

Four to six

Worth doing if the first three are genuinely covered.

Check what the site says about price, since the absence of any figure is the most common reason an enquiry does not happen.

Check the contact details are correct everywhere, including the listing, the footer, and any page carrying an old number.

Read your three most-visited pages as a stranger would, on a phone, and note where you stop.

Each of those is twenty minutes and each finds something on most sites.

None of them requires a developer, a budget, or a decision about design.

Seven to nine

Improvements rather than checks, and the point at which effort starts to be a real cost.

Rewrite one page properly, chosen by traffic and commercial importance, using the figures from your own records.

Add or refresh photographs of actual work, since most sites are still using images from the build.

Deal with the pages you already know are weak, after checking each for links and conversions.

Any one of those is a good January and all three is an ambitious one.

Choose one rather than starting all three, since a page rewritten properly beats three started.

A worked example

A business asked for a list of what to do in January and received nine items.

They did the first three in an afternoon, and the form test found that submissions had been arriving in a spam folder since a hosting change in October.

Eleven enquiries were in there, four of which were still worth answering.

They answered those, fixed the delivery, and did items four and five over the following week.

Nothing from seven to nine was attempted, and the year was better than the previous one.

The whole return came from a two-minute test that had never been done.

Check the things that expire

A fourth item that belongs with the first three for anybody who has not done it recently.

The certificate, the domain, and any licence the site depends on all have dates, and all fail in ways that are visible to customers rather than to you.

Look up the expiry on each, which takes five minutes, and put the dates in a shared calendar with a reminder a month before.

Check at the same time that you can log in to the accounts holding them, since a date you know and an account you cannot reach is not much better than neither.

Doing it in January means the first quarter, where most of these fall, is covered.

What is not on the list

Worth saying, since these are what January enthusiasm usually produces.

A redesign, which is expensive, risky, and rarely the thing holding a site back.

A new platform, unless the current one genuinely cannot be maintained.

A blog started in January, which is the single most reliably abandoned commitment in small business marketing.

And anything requiring a supplier proposal, which will consume the month before any work happens.

Each of those may be right eventually and none of them is the first three.

Do it in the first week

Because the window closes quickly.

January has a fortnight where there is genuinely time, and by the third week the year has started properly.

Put the two hours in the diary now, for a specific morning, rather than intending to fit them in.

Anything not done by the end of the second week will not be done, which is worth knowing when choosing how much to attempt.

That is the argument for three items rather than nine.

Write down what you found

Since half the value is in the record.

Note what you checked, what was wrong, and what you changed, with the date.

Next January that page turns a two-hour exercise into a thirty-minute one and shows what has drifted since.

It also tells you which checks keep finding problems, and those are the ones to do quarterly rather than annually.

For most businesses the form test is one of them.

Do it with somebody else

A small change that makes the checks considerably more useful.

Ask somebody who does not work on the site to sit with you for the third and sixth items, and to say what they would do at each point.

They will stop at things you cannot see any more, ask questions the pages do not answer, and use the site in ways nobody intended.

Twenty minutes of that is worth more than an hour of your own reading, because the thing being tested is whether a stranger can act rather than whether the page is correct.

Write down where they hesitated rather than explaining it to them, since the explanation is the thing the page should have been doing.

The counter-case

A list this short will feel inadequate to anybody who wants to improve their site properly.

Businesses with a real problem, such as a site that is genuinely unfit or unmaintainable, need a project rather than a checklist.

And the items here are maintenance rather than growth, which is deliberate and is not the whole of what a business needs.

But maintenance neglected is what most small sites actually suffer from, rather than a lack of ambition.

Do the first three in the first week, add four to six if there is time, and choose one improvement.

The morning

1. Submit your own form and confirm it arrives.
2. Load the site on a phone, on mobile data.
3. Answer the most common question.
4. Check what it says about price.
5. Check contact details everywhere.
6. Read three pages as a stranger.
7. Choose one page to rewrite properly.

Step one is two minutes and finds the most expensive failure available, which is a form that stopped delivering and told nobody.

Choosing the one thing to improve is covered in one thing to fix in January.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.