Web sites & Graphic identity
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keep it new
Once you have your site out on the Internet you need to give people a reason to come to it. Often. Maintaining your site is one of the most critical parts of its exhibition. Depending on anticipated, and desired, traffic to your site you may want to apply updates on a monthly, weekly, or even daily basis.
This does not necessarily mean that you will have to hire new staff or create a new department at your company. Many of these functions can be automated using common readily available “back end” software.
deciding what will work
How and what you maintain on your site is something entirely dependent on the structure and purpose of your site. If your site is an e-commerce site the demands are very different than those posed by an informational site. We will do our best to advise you on what sort of maintenance you will have to do to keep your site fresh and attractive.
There is a set of always and every time maintenance tasks that will fall to someone on your staff or ours to monitor. Yes, monitor, because, for the most part these tasks will be automated. You just have to make sure that they actually were performed as scheduled. We have provided a list of these tasks.
Regular Maintenance Tasks
1. Regular full backups
This can be fully automated
Your content is important especially if you are running an e-commerce site. To protect your company’s site against catastrophic equipment failure, data corruption, or hacking you need to have full backups of your site and it’s structure. This includes any attached databases. A general rule to determine the frequency of these backups is a question.
“What would you have to do to replace a week, or a month, or a day’s, worth of lost data?”
The answer will differ depending on the type of site and the amount of traffic but we recommend at least weekly data backup to a location that you control.
2. Update page content
This can be partially automated
We cannot stress enough that your site’s content is the thing that keeps your customers, and potential customers, coming back. It has to be freshened regularly to keep the site interesting.
3. Check your traffic statistics
This may be partially automated in some cases
You know, or hope, that there are people viewing your site. The question is; how many? To determine this you need to periodically review the statistical information for your site.
The hosts that we place sites with provide several different ways of looking at the accesses made to your site. These range from raw, hard to read, access logs, to some very pretty graphed information with clear definitions of the data.
4. Check your links external and internal
This can not be automated*
Whenever a page, yours or someone else’s, is updated, you run the risk of a broken link. It is imperative, because of the fluid nature of the Internet, to regularly check the links on your pages. This is easiest to do when page updates are performed. You will want to check the update to determine for certain that everything that has been done is displaying as expected and while you are checking just take a minute to click through the links on the pages.
*There are sites available on the Internet that will review and check any URLs linked from your site and report whether they are currently valid links.
monitor outcomes
Keeping tabs on the activity on your site is a lot like monitoring your sales figures or cost of doing business. You watch the figures. Unlike these necessary parts of owning a business, you do not have to compile the figures. It is done for you.
One of the great features available to you for this purpose is the statistical logging software that is part of the hosting plans that we use. These programs constantly, and without complaint, monitor traffic on your site and place the information into easily understood graphs and tables for your perusal.