How to maintain your website
Creating a website to increase awareness of your organization can be a daunting task. There are many aspects to take into consideration. The purpose, function, placement, creation and maintenance of the website are all substantial decisions best laid out in an initial planning process. For your Website to be a success you must maintain it. If you expect visitors to return, you must provide them with something new, correct errors and keep your site up to date. In addition, you must continue to monitor your search engine ranking, continue to promote your Website and find out who is linking to your site.
This document is designed to answer some of the questions about what building a site may require, and to steer you to outlining a clear and thorough strategy for your site.
1) A maintenance plan for your site.
2) Updated pages for your Website based on your maintenance plan.
3) Determine your search engine ranking.
4) Find out who’s linking to your site.
5) Take additional promotion actions.
How to maintain your website
Having a Website means your job is never done. The Web changes, your information changes and your site must change with it.
Why maintain. Maintenance of a Website is performed for several reasons. These include:
»To enhance and to improve the design.
»To update or add additional information.
»To respond to visitor’s comments/ recommendations.
»To correct errors and design problems.
»Static Websites soon die from lack of interest.
General maintenance guidelines:
Keeping a Website current isn’t a big deal. If your site is not updated regularly, visitors will not bother to return. If you don’t occasionally offer new information or resources, you’re not giving visitors any reason to return. No matter how well publicized your site is, if you don’t maintain it, it will decline in popularity. Keep it simple. Creating new and complicated web pages, will only mean more work for you.
Be reliable, If you promise monthly updates, make sure you live up to your word. Do not offer anything that you can not deliver.
Take any feedback you have received seriously and reply as soon as possible, and thank the visitor. If the feedback contains ideas on improving your site or correcting errors, evaluate each one. If you plan to add the suggestion, send an e-mail to the person who suggested it and indicate that they should return to your site on (specify a date) and see their idea in action.
»You should also place a small “new” graphic next to items that have recently been updated, or added to your site.
»Link Valet is a WWW Link checker. When you enter the index URL of your home page, Link Valet will spider your site. Link Valet.
»If you have a Website that contains more than ten (10) pages, I recommend you check your Website’s internal and external links by downloading and installing Xenu’s Link Sleuth on you’re PC. Best of all it’s free. Runs on Windows 95, 98, NT, 2000 and Windows XP. File size: 230 Kb.
»If you make a change to a page, no matter how small, always validate your HTML code.
»Spell check all changed pages.
»Proof read your changed pages before you upload them.
»MediaMax provides 25 GBs free online backup space for videos, photos, music, files, and work-related documents. Once you upload files to your account, they are automatically backed up and accessible online 24-hours per day.
»Always develop your new pages on your local computer, and then upload them to your Website, only after they work correctly.
»At minimum you should retrieve and archive a backup copy of site content once each week. Always retain a backup copy of your Website on a diskette, as well as your hard drive.
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