One of the most important aspects of web site maintenance is content updates. New content in the form of new products and services, monthly special offerings, useful tips and noteworthy news articles and press releases will give your audience a reason to keep coming back to your site. This will also increase your chance of converting your visitor into a customer. If your web content is stale, visitors will search elsewhere for the things they need. It is therefore very important that the company web site is updated and enhanced regularly with new content and technology. See it as a way of protecting your site and investment.

As you think about upcoming maintenance you would like to perform on your site please consider these two tips that will help encourage returning web site visitors:

Whether you are a project manager like myself or not, we’ve all experienced the problem of expanded goals and objectives sneaking their way into an otherwise well-planned project time-line. We embark on a new project thinking we have sufficiently outlined all the potential objectives. We’ve spend hours planning and predicting a strategic project with reasonable goals and deadlines. Yet once started, we invariably find that we need more, less, or just something different. The dreaded scope creep…simply defined as the growth or change of project requirements. Project managers and clients, alike, hate scope creep because it almost always delays project schedules and increases project costs.

It might not be possible to completely avoid scope creep, but we can take measures to minimize it. And when it does happen, there are ways to manage it. Here are some suggestions for minimizing and managing scope creep:

What do Blue Water Media, Google, Dell, Sun Microsystems and Microsoft have in common? While they all are technology companies and have a strong web presence, I’m sure you know that’s not where I am going with this. What I’m really getting at is that they are all going open source. And yes, I really did say Microsoft.

Google has just entered its open source web browser Chrome into the browser wars, which has seen another open source browser, Mozilla Firefox, make a huge dent in Internet Explorer’s long-standing domination. Additionally, T-Mobile will soon be offering Google’s new open source mobile operating system, Android, on its smartphones.

Meanwhile, Dell, one of the largest PC manufacturers in the world, has started to sell select home computers pre-installed with the open source operating system, Linux. I’m sure HP won’t be far behind to insure they keep their spot atop the list of best selling PC’s.