I remember when Gretchen Wilson's song "Redneck Woman" shot up the charts in 2004, it become an anthem for many in New Hampshire. I'll admit that I ended up at one of her concerts, where the entire crowd sang along to the lines "I keep the Christmas lights on my front porch all year long."
It's always fun to laugh at the people that leave their Christmas lights up, just waiting for the year to run it's course, and the holiday season to return. But, what about the people that leave their web site "as is" all the time? Isn't that the same thing? I'm sure I'm hitting close to home with some readers. With that in mind, I want to suddenly point out where you've left your Christmas lights to hang.
"But, I use Ektron's CMS400.NET to add new content to my site."
That's great. But, how much content are you managing, and how much of it is being updated? It's not just upcoming events, customer lists, or press releases you need to author, but you also need to consider the "freshness" of everything else. Product pages can easily stagnate after a launch or campaign. With a good content management strategy in place, you can continually update your product descriptions, and change page layouts.
"I don't want to change too much and lose my search rankings."
The impact to your SEO is a valid concern. But, unless you have have a particular page tuned like an SEO Ferrari, letting it stagnate will actually hurt your rankings over time. Freshness of content carries a lot of weight with search engines, and you can easily take advantage of that. Use Ektron's Content Reminder to ping you every few months to update your product descriptions, executive bios, and other content blogs that have a tendency to be "set-and-forget" information.
"But that seems like a lot of work. I don't have the time."
Take a look around your organization and determine: a.) who is requesting content changes, b.) who is making content changes, and c.) who should be doing content changes. The power of having a distributed editing platform, like a CMS, is that you suddenly assign authoring capabilities with the individuals that really need them. Doing this removes any bottle necks in publishing, and allows for accountability to be duly assigned.
The moral of this is that you have the tools available to you to extend your SEO/marketing/branding strategy. Don't let the "About Us" page shirk it's responsibilities in driving traffic to your site. Ultimately, it's time take down the Christmas lights, and put up the Easter decoration.