New Year resolutions — Michelle Park

Jan 9

Jan 9 New Year resolutions

It's that time of the year when the calendar has clicked over and we all feel like we have a clean slate of the New Year stretching out in front of us. Boundless opportunities to improve and do things right - or at least better - than we did last year. Here are four popular New Year resolutions that can help you look after your corner of the web just a wee bit better in 2020:

Lose weight and get fit - keeping a lean website saves money and time. This is a great time to audit your content and remove any duplicate or incorrect information - not to mention reacquainting yourself with your responsibilities! Consolidating and simplifying information will help your users find what they're looking for faster, and understand it better. Running an audit over your site content is so satisfying - there are lots of ways to approach such a task. Take it page by page, check links and content, update info and delete where possible. See if you can trim your site down by 20% as a goal.
Get organised - this is the time to start a calendar for your web content. You can use Microsoft Outlook, Trello or craft your own with a spreadsheet - whatever works for you. Find a way to document when and what changes with your web content. Over time a life cycle might begin to appear that will make maintaining your web content way more predictable.
Be more accessible - okay I didn't see this in many 2020 resolutions lists, but I think we could all be more mindful of accessibility when uploading content to the web. Take the time to add alternative text to images, create meaningful and unique link text, use H2, H3 and H4 headings make scannable chunks, write in plain English, use tables for data not layout. If you use video on your site, why not make the effort this year to transcribe content - yes it takes time (but not *that* much) - the value it brings to someone who doesn't have to rely on the YouTube auto-generated captions is worth the effort.
Learn something new - while content management systems do most of the heavy lifting for us these days i.e.: you don't need to know how to use HTML or web programming languages to update and maintain your website anymore, there is still a lot to know about the web to do a good job with web content. Learn something new this year like web analytics, user experience, optimising images (and other assets) for the web, content strategy, or writing for mobile devices - so much to learn! Pick something that interests you or you feel you might be lacking and invest in learning in 2020.