Your company probably has a website. It certainly ought to. Customers and clients from all walks of life expect a business to have an online presence, providing a range of information and means to access the goods and services provided. However, as important as it unquestionably is to establish your company's spot on the world wide web, that should never be seen as an end in itself. To preserve, and indeed increase the advantage to your business, it's absolutely essential that your site is kept thoroughly up-to-date - both in terms of the content and what it says about your company, and also with regard to technology and style, to ensuring that your site never appears obsolete or old-fashioned.

Regardless of whether or not you hired a specialist to design your website, you can make whatever future adjustments and improvements that are needed. One of the easiest ways to do this is by using Microsoft Expression Web. It might seem daunting to take this on by yourself, particularly if you have no experience with coding and web design, and if someone else designed the site for you, but there's no need to fret.

The first thing to remember is that, with Expression Web, precisely no coding expertise whatsoever is needed to maintain and enhance your site. Whatever you need to do can be done visually: adding, removing and altering elements of each page as you see them.

It could be something as simple as changing your organisation's address. This is straightforward enough - click on the text (or any text that you'd like to change) and delete and type as you would in a word processor. You can also format text in just the same way as you're used to in a word processor. In both cases, the necessary code is created automatically and in the background by the software, you don't need to handle anything other than what you can see on the page.

Similarly, a new image can be uploaded to replace an outdated picture with just a click, and can be repositioned or resized by clicking the image or its edges - again in a manner that would be familiar to most, as a standard control from any picture editing program. New text and images can be easily added just by placing the cursor and typing away or selecting an image from your hard drive.

New technologies, some of which may not have been easily available when your website was first designed, can be inserted in just the same way. For example, video players and slideshows can be downloaded as a ready made template into which you can easily slot in your own content. These can then be positioned into a page as easily as any still image.

Adjusting isn't all, however. Perhaps you use the same image multiple times throughout your site - for instance, you may have a corporate logo that appears on every page. If this logo changes, then by updating the individual image, Expression Web will allow you to apply the adjustment throughout the site, wherever the logo appears.

Alternatively, it may be the entire colour scheme of your company that needs changing, with this scheme appearing in every aspect of your site (or perhaps the scheme just needs updating, as fashions move on). The consistent visual appearance of your site should be managed by an external style sheet, using a technology known as CSS (cascading style sheets).

The style sheet will ensure that design details, such as colours or font formatting, is uniform across the site, ensuring that your company's online presence has a professional and coherent visual appeal. When the time comes to alter any or all of these design elements, Expression Web's sophisticated and easy-to-use CSS management engine allows you to pick and choose what you'd like to change, and what you'd like it to become. The new rules you've created will then be applied throughout the site, ensuring that no aspect of your organisation's online presence is left behind.

Once you've got your site fully updated and looking just how you'd hoped, Expression Web has a few further techniques to help ensure that your company appears in the best possible light.

Super Preview tool enables you to assess how your image will appear to every user, across a range of different browsers (and mobile phones). If your site was originally developed some time ago, technologies may have changed, and it's always worth making sure that everything renders as it ought to.

If the reason that you set about updating your site in the first place was that it wasn't making enough impact, the software has a range of search engine optimisation tools to help encourage visitors to your website, where they can enjoy the benefits of your new, improved pages. In order to get the most from all these tools and techniques, it's certainly worth considering a short training course in using Expression Web - and then you can bring your website bang up-to-date, giving your company every possible advantage in a competitive market.