Well, I’ve got the Spring cleaning itch. I get it every year; the urge and energy to clean the windows, sweep out the garage and reorganize the closets.

I am a firm believer that companies need to “spring clean” their content in WebWiz@rd. Part of my responsibility here at REM is to help clients if they have questions with WebWiz@rd. Nine times out of ten, in order to address these concerns, I need to login to their CMS and look at what they are doing first hand. As I am helping, I get a good look at the number of web pages, images, documents, newsflashes and newsletters that they have stored in WebWiz@rd. On a regular basis I see “test pages”, images and documents dated up to 11 years ago and newsflashes and newsletters, again, that are years old, still being stored in WebWiz@rd and sometimes used on the clients website.

By keeping old information in WebWiz@rd, you run the risk of publishing invalid or dated content on your website and you can waste an enormous amount of time scrolling and searching through old files to find what you really want.

Here are a few tips to keep WebWiz@rd clean:

·         Delete old pages from WebWiz@rd. If you have created a page regarding a particular event, sale, announcement, product or service and it is no longer valid and cannot be updated to reflect new information, delete it.   You don’t want to have inaccurate or dated information showing on your website.

 

·         Delete images that you are no longer using. Having old images stored in WebWiz@rd is not a good idea as they take up disk space, and again, you run the risk of using an old image on one of your webpages.

 

·         Delete old Newsletters and Newsflashes. Newsletters and Newsflashes are supposed to be filled with current information. If you have out-of-date Newsletters and Newsflashes available for your customers to read, they may think that you are behind the times and not in touch with your website.

I’m not saying that all “old” information is bad and I’m certainly not suggesting that you login to WebWiz@rd and start deleting everything that looks old! If you do decide to “spring clean” WebWiz@rd, do it thoughtfully and deliberately. Take your time to do it the right way so you don’t regret deleting content that should have been kept.

After you are done cleaning up your CMS, get a cloth and wipe down your desk, keyboard, monitor, printer…