The Need to Keep Your Website Evolving

I started developing websites and software in 1996. I wrote some software that I sold over the internet at the time. I had a simple 5 page site that was not particularly optimized or well marketed. Over time, the business flourished in spite of itself. I hooked up with a marketer, and by 2000 we had sold over a million dollars worth of software.

The business changed. search engine optimization, SEO became the standard. The search engines grew to be more and more competitive. Social networking and blogging has grown to amazing popularity. As connections to the internet got faster, videos and other large bandwidth uses became commonplace.

The web today is nothing like the web of the 90's. It's faster, more interactive, and easier to access. Most people research all kinds of things on the web. It's become such a major resource that I for one, can't even imagine doing without it. My wife even spends time on the search engines, researching things she has questions about, and believe me, she may well be the most anti-technology being on the planet.

You have to keep up with the changes in website development. Yet you may want to stay back a bit from the cutting edge. I've always called it the bleeding edge because of the effort involved understanding and using new and buggy technologies, that don't have good documentation as yet.

Staying back a year or so, gives the newest technologies a chance to mature. That way you won't waste your time dealing with technologies that aren't ready for prime time. You do need to be aware of what's coming. When the tools are built to use the new stuff easily, you'll be ready.

That said, it is disastrous to get too far behind. You need to gather up, and use new technologies, and ideas as they become reasonably easy to work with. You should keep an eye on your competition. Often, they will point the way to new directions you need to be traveling.

The resources are right there on the internet to keep you current. You need to spend some time every day keeping an eye on advancements. A good way to keep up with what is going on in the internet is to subscribe to a few rss feeds from sites like Slashdot. There is a lot of noise, and you can't believe everything they say, but they do keep up with the newest technologies. Another good feed is Andy Beal's Marketing Pilgrim. It's fairly general and self-serving, but he has a nugget from time to time that is valuable to the internet marketer, or website owner.

Check out the ezine articles as well, there is much about the current techniques to help keep you abreast of the changing times.

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