Tend that garden!

Treehouse●Web Industry 5 Comments

House overgrown with ivy

I’ve noticed that websites are like gardens. They get overgrown very quickly. With that in mind, I’ve started to regularly ‘tending’ teamtreehouse.com/blog. Here’s what I’m trying to do on a weekly (or daily) basis …

  1. Click around and browse the site as a visitor
  2. Double-check for spam (If one more person says their name is ‘Web Design London’, I’m going to throw my MBP out the window)
  3. Read the site on different devices to check our Responsive design
  4. Turn off comments on posts older than 30 days (they become spam-crack-dens)
  5. Respond to comments and keep the dialogue going
  6. Write quick, useful posts

Do you have any tips for keeping your site fresh and curated?

[Thanks for the great photo mikeygottawa]

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Comments

  • Lisa P

    If you have a large content-managed site you should be able to set review dates for content. The CMS should ping you when it’s time for an appraisal.

    Also for large sites it’s good to keep a content inventory somewhere. Kristina Halvorson has lots of great tips in her book.

    Periodically use Google’s Webmaster Toolkit or your CMS to check for broken links.

    Sticking with the garden analogy, make sure you feed and water it – if some sections are looking thin on content, have a plan for how to generate some more. If you’re struggling to do that, maybe that section needs a rethink or uprooting entirely.

    • http://carsonified.com Ryan Carson

      Thanks Lisa! :)

  • http://twitter.com/cjdsie Christopher Da Sie

    Great article Ryan. I think you make some excellent points here. I know I’ve fallen into the trap of laziness before on one of my sites that I manage. When I finally got back to it, I felt like it had become that picture you have in the post. Completely overgrown with Spam, deprecated code, etc. It took a lot to bring the site back to life. I’ve now become much mor
    e diligent in keeping things in check. A great post and a great reminder that everything on the web is organic and needs tending to.

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  • http://jamesdoc.co.uk/ thedoc

    While I do agree that older posts do tend to become ‘spam-crack-dens’, turning comments off can be upsetting for those who come into an archived post through a search engine, etc who may have a legitimate question, or want to respond to the post’s topic…

  • David Giard

    Here are some great tips from a successful blogger: http://technologyandfriends.com/archive/2011/03/21/tf145.aspx