By Angie Kilbourne
Shop Site of the Month
Golden West Collision Centers - San Jose and Sunnyvale, Calif.
www.goldenwestautobody.com
Golden West's site presents a polished, professional image to the collision repair customer, reassuring the viewer that this is an outfit that can turn around a very upsetting, emotional event. Great information is provided to customers: a shop tour, a graphic explanation of the repair process, an online scheduler, and the Auto Watch feature that shows the progress on a repair.
Web Wise
Spring Cleaning
When it comes to your Web presence, January is the perfect time for "spring cleaning." If you haven't taken a close look at your Web site in a while, spend an hour carefully assessing any items for maintenance.
Do you have any material that needs updating? Pay careful attention to any language that makes reference to time periods and the organizations with which you partner. Also review your pages thoroughly for typos and broken links.
What about your staff listings? Do bios need to be updated? How old are the pictures? Could that whole section use some reorganization?
Maintenance tips or other consumer-oriented educational resources on your site should receive regularly scheduled updates. How old is the material you have posted there? As technology moves forward with vehicles, it's important that you provide fresh information to your customers about the care and repair of their vehicles.
Speaking of fresh content, do you share your customer newsletter material online? If you don't, perhaps it's time you started providing prospective customers with a clearer picture of why they should be doing business with you. If you already are posting your newsletters online, is the section current and up-to-date?
Other important Web site maintenance items that you shouldn't overlook:
- Your domain name registry should be reviewed to ensure all contact information
is current to avoid missing renewal and other important notices.
- Review the e-mail accounts associated with your business. Are there old accounts still hanging around that belonged to former employees? Remove them immediately.
- Your copyright should be updated when your content is modified. For example, technical tips that were created in 2007 should read "Copyright (c) 2007." But material that you wrote last year and update in 2008 should carry the line "Copyright (c) 2007, 2008." For more information on copyrights, visit the U.S. Copyright Office at www.copyright.gov.
One last important item: Be sure to check your site on multiple Web browsers and, if at all possible, from different computer platforms. In other words, if you primarily use PCs, ask a friend with a Mac to review your site. Though Internet Explorer is still the front-runner with users, check your site's functionality with others, such as Netscape, Firefox and Opera.
Net Numbers
In late November, 96,228,601 domains were currently active worldwide. This number includes the more than 71 million .com domains.
Source: DomainTools.com, Nov. 29, 2007, report
ASA Web Ways
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