Keeping your site fresh:
events, seasons, and what's on

Here is something visitors notice within seconds, even if they could not tell you what it was they noticed.

Is anybody actually minding this website? Or has it been abandoned?

A What's On section with events from last summer still sitting in it. A special offer that expired in March. A news post from two years ago at the top of the page, announcing something that has long since come and gone.

Those things tell a visitor a great deal about how actively you are looking after your online presence. And, fairly or not, they draw a conclusion from that about how you will look after them.

A website that has not changed in six months tells people everything they need to know.

None of it good.

Now, I want to be careful here, because I am not describing lazy businesses. Nearly every operator I have met with a stale website is working themselves into the ground. The website is not stale because they do not care. It is stale because of how it was set up.

The site was built in a way that makes changing anything a chore. The system is not obvious. Nobody was ever properly shown how to use it. There is no clear place to put anything time-sensitive, so where would you even put it.

So the updates go on a list. And the list gets longer. And the gap between the website and the actual business gets wider, until the whole thing feels like it needs to be redone from scratch before anything can be changed at all.

And so nothing changes. And the website gets older. And staler.

That is a design and workflow problem, not a character flaw. The businesses that keep their sites fresh are not the ones with more time on their hands. They are the ones whose websites were built so that a seasonal change is a five-minute job instead of a half-day project with a phone call in the middle of it.

So let me talk about what keeping a site fresh actually involves, because it is far less than people imagine.

It does not mean constantly rewriting your content. It does not mean blogging every week, or making videos, or any of that. It means having a few places on the site that can be changed quickly when something changes in the business.

A seasonal banner on the home page. This is the simplest, highest-impact change there is. Somebody arriving on your site in January and being met with a blazing summer photograph and summer messaging feels, at some level they could not articulate, that they have arrived at the wrong time of year. Swapping that image to match the season we are actually in, or the one coming if you are chasing advance bookings, takes minutes and immediately makes the whole site feel current.

An events section. Not a fancy calendar with filters. Just a plain list of what is on in your area and at your place over the coming weeks. Local festivals. Seasonal openings. The tour that only runs in May. Those items give somebody a reason to come at a particular time, and they quietly prove that a human being is paying attention.

A news or blog area. And by that I do not mean a commitment to producing regular content. I mean a place where you can stick a short note when something happens worth noting. An award. A new menu. A few paragraphs about what this place is like in winter. They do not have to be long. They have to be recent.

And then there is the imagery, which matters more here than most people think. Tourism in this country is deeply seasonal, and so is the head of the person planning the trip. Somebody planning for February wants to see February. They want to know what your part of the world looks like in winter, what the light does, how quiet it is, whether it is worth it. A home page full of August sunshine is not irrelevant to them. It is just not as persuasive as something that looks like the trip they are actually planning.

Now, there is one more thing worth saying, which is how to stop this happening again.

Because the honest truth is that nobody updates a website because they remembered to. They update it because something prompted them. So the answer is not to try harder. It is to give yourself a prompt.

Put four dates in the calendar for the year. One at the start of each season. Half an hour each time, no more than that. New image at the top, check the offers, take down anything that has passed, add whatever is coming up. Four half hours a year and your website never goes properly stale again.

And if there is somebody on the team who is handy with a phone camera, give them the job of sending you one good photograph a month. Just one. Whatever the place looked like that month. Within a year you have a proper seasonal library and you will never again be stuck putting an August photograph up in February because it is the only decent one you own.

The businesses that stay fresh are not more organised than you. They just turned it into a small habit instead of a big job.

So what can you do this week? Three jobs.

The first one. Go through your website as a first-time visitor planning a trip this season. Look at everything. Is there anything clearly out of date? An expired offer, a past event, a photograph from the wrong half of the year? Take it down today. Even one or two stale items, once noticed, make a visitor wonder what else on the site cannot be trusted.

The second. Think about what you could add right now that is specific to this season or the next few weeks. A few lines on why your experience is particularly good at this time of year. A mention of something happening locally. A new image at the top of the page. None of these are big jobs. A couple of sentences and a new photograph tells everybody that somebody is at the wheel.

And the third. If updating the website feels technically awkward to you, that is the actual problem to solve, and it is worth solving properly. A website you cannot easily change is not fully working for you. Ask whoever looks after your site to show you how to make simple content changes, and get them to write it down while they are at it. And if you would rather hand the whole business of updating over to somebody else, that is a perfectly reasonable decision too.

And here is what I want to leave you with.

Your business changes with the seasons, and the weather, and whatever is on locally that month.

Your first hello should feel every bit as alive as your business is.