Did You See What I Published Today?

I read an interesting blog post today on a Geek Blog by Phil Burns. He said his company instituted the following doctrine for it’s employees: “If the customer didn’t see it, you didn’t do it.” What a great creed for publishers (webmasters and bloggers ARE publishers, by the way).

For a long time I have given myself the goal of posting something of value to genealogists every weekday on Genealogy Today. But reading this doctrine made me wonder if those countless efforts had ever been seen by anybody, and thus according to Phil, had I actually done them?

I have no way of measuring my net accomplishments, but I can share with you the steps I took to make sure that, at a minimum, the things that I published could be seen.

1. Did I put appropriate keywords in the META tag?
2. Does it appear in the site search?
3. Can I find it on my site map?
4. Does it deserve a home page link?
5. Is it newsworthy? (then it goes on my news page)
6. Is it pressworthy? (then I write a press release)
7. Is it buzzworthy? (then I’ll post it to some lists)
8. Is it linkworthy? (then I’ll message a few webmasters)
9. Should I add it to my site history page?
10. Did I mention it in my weekly newsletter?
11. Should I blog about it on my corporate blog?

That’s right, I go through this list at the end of every day to make sure that whatever I’ve published can be found by my visitors. (#11 is a new addition to the list)

In looking at this list, however, I noticed that I don’t have a “what’s new” page. I’d like to get some comments on whether or not genealogists find “what’s new” pages useful when visiting sites.