by Ana Lewis

Created on: April 21, 2010

The Dirty Dozen to Spring Cleaning Your Website on Earth Day

In an attempt to make clearing the clutter from your website sound like more fun than pulling weeds, I have created this handy-dandy checklist with some free software to help you make your website the shining portrait of your business and a true reflection of your values. Make this list an annual review of your site. Using a date, like Earth Day to spring clean, clear the clutter and conduct major updates will make it not seem so overwhelming.

There are some items you should do monthly, weekly or even daily – simple updates, blog posts, specials, news and events – all should be done as required. The list below is to do annually, page-by-page and dot by dot... heck, you paid for it, might as well keep it up. Just like putting oil in your car, it's the regular maintenance that will keep your website humming.:

1. Check Your Site in Various Browsers: Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Internet Explorer. An easy (and free) piece of software to use is Browser Shots: http://browsershots.org – type in your URL and in a few minutes it will show you how your site looks in various browsers.

2. Check Your Links – The easiest way to do this is to set it up to be checked automatically for you. A free software named Link Tiger http://www.linktiger.com/ will do just that and send you emails anytime there is a broken link on your site that needs repair.

3. Check Your Site's Rankings – Alexa.com is one of the best known and most widely used. Go to http://www.alexa.com/ , set up an account and then get back more information than you will know what to do with... it's a little bit humbling to see ba-zillions of websites and to try to get excited about ranking in the 6 figures...

4. Feedback Forms – fill them all out, update the software (always new updates available) , and make sure that they are all working properly, going to the right people and still requesting relevant information.

5. Update Your About Section – update your staff, add photos, add awards and certifications, edit content.

6. Check Any and All Flash Files and Videos – when was the last time you sat through your entire Flash introduction? Do you have additional videos to upload? Do you also have them uploaded on YouTube? If they are your videos, establish an account (or add to your current one) and send out your updated Flash and video content via Twitter and Facebook to promote.

7. Work samples / Portfolio – make sure

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