The buds are swelling, the dust bunnies have grown – that means it’s time for spring cleaning again. Spring cleaning should transcend your house and yard, however. It should also apply to your website. Here are four helpful articles from a special series we put together on spring cleaning your website:

Spring Clean Your Website – Part 1

Spring Clean Your Website – Dead Links (Part 2)

Spring Clean Your Website Copy (Part 3)

Spring Clean Your Website: Refresh the Design (Part 4)

As time passes and your goals and objectives evolve, so should your website copy. If you’ve been following our series on spring cleaning your website, including putting together a clean team and purging dead links (click here to see all the articles in the series), you’ll be in the perfect place to start focusing on the words and structure that you use to communicate with your audience.

While keeping up on your website copy isn’t as fluid an activity as is purging your dead links, you still need to make sure your site is connecting to people appropriately and that you’re broadcasting the right message. Always watch your analytics to make sure you’re receiving the responses you expect. Otherwise, it’s time to make some changes.

The process of cleaning up your copy should be an abbreviated version of the one you followed when you began to write copy for your website. Here’s how you should start from scratch:

1. Come up with a website architecture, or wireframe, that outlines every page of your site. That way you know what you need to provide copy for.
2. Scope out the key concepts you want to convey for each page, usually three to five bullets for each page.
3. Round up your research and source material to support your key concepts.
4. Identify the appropriate tone for your website – chummy or serious?

Here’s the abbreviated version of the process you should follow when you’re cleaning up your content:

1. Review your site structure. Do you have all the pages you need? The link-checking process you went through earlier should have identified gaps and unnecessary pages.
2. Evaluate your message. Does the copy on those pages still match up with your key concepts? Do those key concepts still reflect your organization?
3. Incorporate updates. Do you have additional research and source material to boost your copy? Look for new case studies, testimonials or tools, like social media widgets like a Twitter feed or most recent blog entries.
4. Watch your tone. Does the copy’s tone still match your organization’s personality? You might find the tone too academic, or too punchy when you first wrote it, and it doesn’t accurately represent your mission.
5. Finally, fix problems. This is possibly the most important step, and it’s a great chance to address any communications problems you’re having. For instance, your front desk might be fielding calls about directions or e-mailing forms that you can easily transfer to your site. Seek out potential communications bottlenecks, such as poor search engine results, i.e., SEO issues, that you can address with better copy.

Check back tomorrow to pick up the next article in our series on spring cleaning your website. Make sure you don’t miss anything by subscribing to the RSS news feed. Not sure what an RSS feed is? Click here.

At home, the flower beds are clean, the trees are pruned and the windows are sparklingly clear. I, probably like most of you, have been doing spring cleaning, and working my way down a list of home maintenance and improvement tasks. It’s satisfying to check those items off and look at the polished result.

At work, I’m also doing spring cleaning, and I hope some of you are too. I like to take some time every six months or so (call the second session fall clean-up) to tidy up some of the messiness that has worked its way into our website over the winter months. It’s also a good time to stand back and make some critical decisions about the functionality of your website and evaluate the direction you’re headed. Websites should never sit stagnant, and putting some time on the calendar at least twice a year to evaluate your strategy should be a given.

This week, we’ll guide you through a clean-up and revitalizing process that you can follow on your own website. Today we’ve got three things you can do to prep for your week of good housekeeping.

Put together a clean team. You’re about to do a major clean-up and make some big decisions. It’s not something one person should do alone, so put together a task force. If you are an army of one, just make sure to pace yourself. Here’s a good model for putting together a team:

• You should have someone at a high level who can either make these decisions or who has the power to put them on the schedule for evaluation.
• Also appoint someone to act as project manager. The person to put together a schedule, arrange meeting times and generally make sure everyone is moving along.
• Finally, have one or more people to do the busy work: someone to update copy, remove dead links, make little changes. Volunteers can be a big help here.

Dedicate half an hour every day. Consistency is the key to spring cleaning – not killing yourself with work. Just set aside half an hour or an hour every day for a week to evaluate what needs to be done. Your task may take longer than half an hour, but you’ll be able to budget how much time you’ll need to do it in half an hour.

Set up a place to submit comments/ideas. While you’re cleaning up the website you have, you’re going to have ideas about the website you wish you had. Establish a place for you and your team to submit ideas or discoveries so you can decide if you want to add new functionality to your website. Check out this earlier post Make a Better Website with a User Survey for ideas of how to collect ideas and responses.

Good luck setting up today. Tune in tomorrow for the next step in your polished-up website, and click here to see all stories about spring cleaning.

When I first started paying careful attention to the people who visit my website, I was surprised at how many went to our contact page. Sure, some people would send messages or look up a phone number, but not everybody.

Many people look at your contact page so they can learn something about you. They want to know where you are, who works at your organization, what you look like and different ways to get in touch with you (such as Twitter or Facebook).

Take a few minutes today to check out your contact page and see if it says everything it should. Also check out this earlier post on where to put links to your contact info.

The sorry truth about your carefully crafted website copy is that people aren’t really reading it. People scan web pages very quickly, and they only pick up bits of information from a few key places, namely top left.

For you, it means you should think like a resume writer when you go to put words on your site:

• Use bullet points. Like the ones here. Isn’t it easier to scan?
• Use bold to set off paragraphs and sentences. Again, it snags your eye as you scan downward.
• Use information-carrying words at the beginning of paragraphs

Overall, emphasize quality over quantity. As beautiful as the writing is, most people simply don’t read it.