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This is the blog of Neil Turner Software. Here we will give news of projects that we are currently working on and our thoughts on anything that takes our fancy in and around the internet industry.

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Thursday 21 January 2010

Keeping your website up to date with latest news

The recent cold and snowy period caused much disruption to business, transport and schools. It was during this spell websites were used to keep people up to date with the latest information such as weather, delays and affected opening times. However we learnt first hand that some businesses are still not using their websites effectively for relaying important information even though the tools should be readily available to them.

The nursery that one of our children attends has had a website up and running for about six months now. It’s a flash based site that shows the standard information about the nursery, its fees and contact details. It’s clear that the target market for the website is the parent looking around for a nursery (however not optimized well at all - even for their name) rather than parents of children that already attend.

During the snowy period the nursery staff experienced problems getting in to work and consequently there were a number of days when the nursery was closed or had amended opening times. Getting news about whether the nursery was going to be open and closed was difficult - usually the news was received by the parent calling the nursery just before leaving home in the morning - and then only if the call wasn’t engaged or even worse going through to voicemail. On one occasion the news was relayed by a note that had been put up on the front door of the nursery.

We found it a shame that the internet hadn’t been used more to make disseminating the closure news easier for both the nursery and the parents. Effective use of the nursery’s website could have meant that latest news was shown to parents on the home page - being able to change copy on a website home page at short notice should be possible for all businesses and a business that cannot should really be asking questions of their web designer.

Other solutions that could have worked equally well that immediately spring to mind are a global email to the email addresses of all parents. Email lists like this are not difficult to maintain, emails are quick and are effectively free to send out. Maybe even a Facebook group in this age of social networking, or finally, even though a cost would be involved, could be automatically sending a text message to each parents mobile phone.

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