Website maintenance includes two components: the parts you see and the parts that you don’t.
Behind the scenes, the technologies used to build your site must be regularly maintained. Why? Search engine algorithms change, content discovery practices evolve, and platform updates make last year’s “hot styles” functionally obsolete.
Much like any other technology used to run your business, core systems—the applications, plugins and themes that are the building blocks of your site—need routine version updates to ensure compatibility with new functions and security requirements. Just because you’re paying a “maintenance” fee to your old web developer doesn’t mean application maintenance is being done (be certain to ask).
In the foreground of your site is the web content. In every business, there are changes occurring monthly, weekly and even daily that should be reflected on your website. Yet, all too often, websites are stood up on Day One and then ignored. Aging sites fail to reflect the current objectives and messages of your business—or support the efforts of your sales professionals. Even more detrimentally from a marketing standpoint, they “age” in the eyes of search engines, where “new” means “current” and fresh sites will rank above those with content that hasn’t been touched in months or longer.
A plan for monthly web updates and content marketing should be included in part of every marketing plan.
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Why Your Business Website NEEDS a Privacy Policy
If your business has a website, chances are you’re capturing information about your visitors on a landing page, newsletter sign-up form or contact form. The data you collect is called personally identifiable information (PII), and what happens to that data is important not just to your business, but to legal entities as well.
Privacy laws in the US and around the world regulate the collection and use of PII, and these laws require websites to disclose:
- What PII is collected
- What is done with that PII
- Who the PII is shared with
Required disclosures are made in the Privacy Policy, which should be posted on your website for any visitor to access.
At this point you may be thinking, “my business is really small, why should I care?” For one thing, you’d probably prefer to avoid fines and lawsuits. All businesses are subject to these laws, and the penalties for not complying range from $2,500 per violation to €20,000,000. Ouch! And for another, a privacy policy helps reassure your website visitors that you care about their privacy. Consumers today are more vigilant than ever about the collection, use and sharing of their data, and a study by Cisco found that privacy concerns can slow down the sales cycle by an average of 7.8 weeks.
So how do you go about writing and maintaining a privacy policy? Well, if you’re not a large corporation with a privacy attorney on staff, you have a few options:
- Hire a privacy attorney to maintain your policy.
- Assign a staff member to keep track of all the state, national and international laws and update your privacy policy regularly. (The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) took effect on January 1, 2020, so make sure you don’t forget that one!)
- Ignore the issue and hope you don’t get sued.
- Take advantage of a generator that keeps the policy updated for you.
Obviously, the first three options aren’t ideal for an SMB, and that’s why we recommend a policy generator, which creates a privacy policy specific to your business. All you have to do is answer a few questions and the generator produces the policies you need, including Privacy Policies, Terms & Conditions, Disclaimers and End User License Agreements. You then add some code to your website (or use the WordPress plug-in) and the generator automatically updates the policy on your website as laws change. You also receive a notification when policies change so you won’t be caught by surprise.
In summary, if your business website collects any information about visitors, you NEED a privacy policy. You can write one yourself, hire an attorney, or use a more cost-effective solution such as a generator. But the sooner you have one in place, the better.
This post is courtesy of MMC Project Manager Chris White.