How Often Should You Update Your Website Content and Design?

We often keep our homes up to date with seasonal maintenance on our gardens and a fresh coat of paint on our walls. The same goes for maintaining your website. It is important to keep your website up to date with current information and a fresh design to keep your viewers interested and continue to come back to your site. The question is how often should you keep updating your site?

A good indication or rule of thumb to maintaining your website is to update it as often as you want your viewers to visit. For instance, if you were to receive a newspaper every morning with the same headlines and the same information, eventually you will stop reading the paper. Well the same applies for your website, make sure your readers have fresh content that will keep them coming back to learn more or they will lose interest.

Updating the design of your site can be a little trickier. If you update your web design too often you can risk communicating instability, if you don’t change it often enough than you can risk looking outdated and deal with other complications and factors that come from browser updates and rules of the web that are constantly changing and progressing. A good rule of thumb for maintaining the design of your site would be to update it every other year or so. However, you can still update flash components on your homepage or other small graphics you may have that still give it a fresh updated look and that capture your viewers attention. This is all relative to the type of business you may be projecting. If you are an ecommerce site, you may want to keep things updated more often with new sales or showcase your latest model of furniture, or museum piece etc.

Make sure you keep track of expired dates on your website. You want to make sure your viewers know that your information is new and updated. Having an expired sale or showcase can give your readers the impression that your website is not maintained and therefore will stop checking.

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What the Health Care Reform Means for Your Small Business

Small businesses are extremely disadvantaged currently in regards to the U.S health care system in comparison to large businesses and their counterparts and are an important entity on the U.S economy. With the new Health Care Reform taking effect what will that mean for small businesses now and in 2014? Below are some pros and cons you can expect to see in the next few years.

It’s important to define what a small business is before you can determine whether these changes will benefit or affect you. A small business is defined as fewer than 100 employees or in some cases fewer than 50 employees depending on the state. Companies with 10 employees or less will benefit the most by receiving the highest tax credit if the employee wages are low.

Starting this year:

1. Very Small Companies: If you have a 10 employee company or less with an average salary of less than $25,000 you can get a 35% tax credit.


2. Small Companies: If you have a 25 employee company or less with an average salary of less than $50,000 you can qualify for a smaller tax credit.


3. No Tax Credit: If you have more than a 25 employee company and/or an employee that earns more the $80,000.

Starting in 2014:

1. SHOP (Small Business Health Options Programs) Exchanges: Small companies will be able to set up health insurance pools which will allow small companies to group together to purchase health insurance.


2. Very Small Companies: If you have a 10 employee company or less with an average salary of less than $25,000 you can get a 50% tax credit.


3. Penalized: If you have a company with 50 employees or more you will be penalized $750 per full-time employee if you don’t provide health care insurance, excluding the first 30 employees you don’t cover. This does not affect companies with fewer than 50 employees.


4. Additional Fines: If you do not cover 60% of your employees health costs overall and government-defined set of services you will receive additional fines.


5. Higher Premiums: If you pay more than $10,200 per year for health insurance for your individual employees, or more than $27,500 for your employees with family coverag, the insurer will get charged by the government a 40% excise on the portions you pay, which means higher premiums for you and/or your employees.


6. Coverage: If you offer your employees health care you must cover no less than 72.5% of the cheapest health plan. If your employees have a family plan you must cover no less that 65%.


7. No coverage: If you choose to not cover your employee’s health care you must pay 8% of the average wages defined in a certain period to the SHOP exchange Commissioner. You are fined a $100 per violation day if you do not pay your SHOP fee. (The penalty for not providing insurance will increase to $2,000).

"While EO uses reasonable efforts to include accurate and up-to-date information, we make no warranties or representations as to the accuracy of the Content and assume no liability or responsibility for any error or omission in the Content. EO does not represent or warrant that use of any Content will not infringe rights of third parties. EO has no responsibility for actions of third parties or for content provided by others, including User Content."