The blank slate is as beautiful as it is terrifying. Start with your goal. What do you want users to do when they visit your site? From there, you can start building a map of your site that shows the journey you want to lead them on and the experience you want to give them.

When you’re looking for ways to improve your existing site, bringing in a fresh pair of eyes is never a bad idea. The two sites that I currently maintain were started by someone else, and when I was brought in to maintain them, I started by doing an “audit” of what was already there. It’s a good way to test what is and isn’t working, to refresh things that are getting stale, and to find new ways to express your brand.

Maintaining an up-to-date site is the best way to show visitors that you’re paying attention to what you’re doing, and it forces the search engines and the bots that run the internet to re-read your site, which helps keep it on their radar. This means updating old information, adding new photography, refreshing the home page and maintaining SEO.