The first cottages reload

The new style holiday cottages site has been live for over a week now, so I thought I should, as planned earlier on, reload the database.

The agreement with the provider is that the reload is at least monthly. But with my new style of website, an essential element is listing the latest cottages on the site's home page, plus the home pages for the areas. Within each of these lists, only the 10 most recent additions are displayed. So with the load today, 13 new properties were added. this means that only a randomly chosen 10 will appear on the home page.

Does this matter? Well the purpose of putting this information on the home page are: it adds regularly updated content to these page; it makes the search engines find the new property pages a lot quick (if they are visiting the home page that often). So there's a balance.

If I update every day, for argument's sake, then the new properties will drop down the list one or two positions at a time. If I update every month, then a new 10 are picked up each month.

On balance, creeping down the list is best. This way every new property gets a chance of being on the home page, and the content changes slightly, with blocks staying the same for when the search engines come back. Ideally encouraging the search engines to the site every day would be ideal, but a weekly visit is most likely. So being prepared for that visit is probably the target.

Therefore, I must be uploading the new file at least every week, probably twice a week to cope with cases when search engines return after 6 days etc. So it looks like that's the routine I must develop.