By Christian Mullins
It’s spring again! Time to clean out the garage, open the windows, and scare your local refuse collector with the amount of junk you accumulated, then threw out, over a period of 12 months.
Since you’re already in a cleaning mode, here’s a few quick tips to get your credit union’s website back in peak condition:
Clean Out The Garage:
Believe it or not, your homepage is a lot like your garage; it’s the gateway into your world. If you take care of your garage, it looks clean and organized. If you don’t, it looks like, well, a garage, and it needs to be cleaned out.
Not every deal, special, or announcement needs to be on your homepage, just the most important ones. Aren’t sure what should stay and what should go? Take a look at your web reports and bury the links and ads members don’t use.
Mow The Lawn:
There’s nothing like the sight of a freshly cut lawn. It’s even and tight, and it feels nice just to stand on it (ok, maybe that’s just me). The same can be said for your homepage.
Much like your garage, this is about getting rid of excess. There’s a theory that your homepage should fit inside your member’s monitor. No scrolling. While I don’t know if that’s realistic, try to keep your site’s homepage as close to one screen as possible. It’ll look nice, and members might even see what the bottom of your page looks like before clicking on their desired link.
Clean Out Your Refrigerator:
There’s nothing more vile than a refrigerator with its own ecosystem, so it’s time to toss the cottage cheese that went bad in 2006. And when your fruit pulses, it’s time to don some rubber gloves and do some dirty work. It’s thankless, but it saves the embarrassment of someone drinking three week old milk.
Double checking every… single… hyperlink on your website is no glory job either, but it has to be done. External links change all the time, and some of the internal links may have as well. Once it’s been done once, you can hand the job off to someone else to do monthly. By that time, it’ll be more like dusting (no one notices when it’s been done, but everyone knows when it hasn’t) than fridge duty.
Tend Your Whole Garden:
There’s more than one vegetable in the garden, but if you only weed around the carrots, your tomatoes will suffer. Likewise, there’s more than one web browser out there.
The top three web browsers in the world today are Firefox (37.0%), Internet Explorer 6 (30.1%), and Internet Explorer 7 (21.9%). Your website may look pristine on one browser but look a little messy on another. If your website looks good on both Firefox and Internet Explorer (6 or above) you’re in good shape.
Reevaluate Your Wall Art:
Much like music, art is in the eye of the beholder. However, most would agree that a movie poster held up with thumbtacks will draw the kind of attention you don’t want.
Clip Art is along the same vein. In the early days of the Internet, clip art was as good as it got; it didn’t use a lot of memory and dial-up surfers weren’t left behind. With most of America on DSL or better, it’s time to upgrade to photos. It looks nicer and won’t give your site that antiquated feel.
Invite Some People Over:
Now that you’ve cleaned, invite some neighbors over. If you don’t, they may glance over when they drive by, but since they already know where they’re going, they probably won’t notice.
If your credit union offers online banking, make sure the only way your members can access it is through an embedded link on your homepage. Otherwise, they may have bookmarked the link rather than your homepage and they’ll never know what you have to offer.