One of the most critical things we can do to make our sites more interesting and "sticky" is to make them change on a regular basis. Those changes can be news, events, jobs, stories... even blog or twitter entries.

Making the homepage change slightly adds interest and will hopefully bring people back to find out what's new. It is particularly useful if you have an ongoing campaign or program as it builds a story and keeps interest growing. It also works well if you have a big upcoming event that you can build expectation for.

The other key benefit from changing the homepage is that it helps your search engine ranking - so it is worth considering just for that.

There are several ways of doing it: adding new stories/updates by hand via your normal web tools is probably the only way to add your news. But you can easily add tailored news stories from an RSS feed. These are free and freely available from sites such as the BBC. Third Sector offers them for charity news and there are many other sources available.

Lots of sites are starting to offer widgets... how many people have joined your Facebook group, how many have watched your YouTube video, or how much has been raised on justgiving for an appeal or a specific event participant. You could probably even rotate these figures or have multiple appeals, basically using the widgets like an animated gif of changing images.

BUT WHATEVER YOU DO - please make sure that if you have a story or event that is dated on your homepage it is either updated or removed when it is out of date. Obviously the time period is up to you, but advertising "future events" past the event looks terrible, and listing 3 month old news headlines as "NEWS" looks like you have nothing to say.

Remember that the word NEWS is based on the word "new".

Sue Fidler, Sue Fidler Ltd