Many companies treat their website like an attic using it as a place to put all their old junk they've come up with over the years: old brochure copy, old videos, old audio bits. And worst of all when they do come up with new marketing ideas they usually leave the old stuff up.

Eventually, the website becomes an unnavigable mess filled with branding contradictions. Are you the 'clean and clear' company? Then why do you have so much stuff on your site? Are you the 'authoritative' company? Then why do you have volumes of contradictory content?

The point is just because it's easy to put and keep endless amounts of material on your website it doesn't mean that you should. Many companies use their once-every-five-years website redesign to address content issues and compatibility. That might have been okay back in 1996 when you were charged $50,000 for that 10 page html website (those were the days) and you really wanted to flog the value out of it, but it's not good now. It's like a business plan. Not long ago a business plan had 3 and 5 year forecasts. No longer. Most of us have to update the damn things every 6 months. And so it should be with your website. It should reflect the changes in the marketplace as well as the changes the company have enacted to address them.

So even if you're not in the middle of a wholesale redesign, get someone to read through your website every three months and report back with new irrelevancies. Because if you don't find it, some else will and you'll get one of those snarky emails from a smarty-pants, grammar nerd. And if you have a blog, for God's sake get rid of the really old posts.