Lint & lollies in your website?

Have you ever seen the lint, lolly wrappers and old (hopefully unused!) tissues in the bottom of a handbag due for a clean out?

Lea uses that analogy for websites – many have too much old clutter that is hard to find, but are greatly improved by a tidy up. I like the analogy and it reminded me of a particular website.

The AvSuper website was old when I first started helping the fund with their communications. Initially, I left the site alone and made corrections and updates as required. Even I had trouble finding things on the site and much of it was even repeated on various pages. It really was like a handbag that hadn’t been cleaned out in a long time.

Once we reached the point of having the look refreshed, I was then able to reorganise the information and make the site more user-friendly. My main priorities were:

• make information easy to find through simple navigation
• have information on the site only once (creating a smaller site to search, manage and update) and use hyperlinks to share it
• keep things simple and not overwhelm people with unnecessary pages and information

So how long is it since you cleaned out your website? Is there a lot of useless information still there that could be deleted? Do you need a refreshed look or some content changes?

PS Of course, this just reminds me I need to make time reviewing my site, too!