Maintenance / Updates

What a boring subject! Everyone hates to do maintenance and updates, we all just want to get in there and build or create or invent, then just sit back and rake in the money, right?

Reasons for regularly updating your site
Well, when it comes to websites, there's good reasons why you need to keep it updated, and someone has to do it! Here's some of the reasons for regularly maintaining your site and keeping it updated:

• If you regularly change some of the content on your site, like having a "news" or "upcoming events" section on your site, then it keeps the pages fresh, your visitors and customers will want to keep coming back to your site to read what's new.
• Changing content gives the impression of a dynamic business - a business that's constantly evolving, growing, keeping up with trends. A site that's been static for months just gives the impression that the business does not really care about having an up to date website.
• Search engines tend to favour sites that are forever evolving. They will come back to your site more frequently, keeping it indexed and ranked more highly if they perceive it as an active site.
• Outward links need to be maintained. If you have links from your website to pages on other websites (and you should, for better search engine rankings), then from time to time, you should ensure that the links still work. Links do break, for various reasons: maybe the site you linked to has closed down, or maybe the site you're linking to has reorganised its pages, and your links no longer point to valid pages. Broken links dishearten your visitors, they give the impression of a shabby website.

Keeping updates simple
So how do you keep the maintenance of your site as simple as possible, so that it's not such a pain to do? You should ensure your site is built with a good content management system (CMS) in place. A good CMS allows you and your staff to regularly and easily update your site, without having to pay a web programmer or learn special web programming skills yourself. For instance, updating news items on the front page of your site should be as simple as typing in a new paragraph of information - directly into a web-based interface, and the changes become active immediately. (See Zope for an example of a great Content Management System - and much more.)

Of course, the site has to be designed and built correctly from the beginning. You should identify, early on, areas of the site that you'd like to regularly update or add to, then have the site built to suit. The updates may be text-type content that's keyed into the CMS, or the updates may be automatically displayed from database information linked to your site.

Systems Administration
It's a good idea to have a systems-administration menu built with your website too. This is something that the general public never sees, so only you and your selected staff have access to it. The systems-admin menu might have functions such as:

• Daily/weekly/monthly counters of new visitors or new members to your site.
• Membership maintenance facilities, allowing you to view or change membership details, cancel memberships etc.
• Product / price maintenance. Allowing you to make changes to product, price or availability details in the database linked to your website.
• Statistics of sales, returns, payments and any other type of transaction that your website might handle.
• Emailing to individual members or groups of members, on a one-off or cyclic basis.

The importance of Server updates
The web application server and web server software needs to be kept updated too, to minimise bugs and security threats, and to introduce new features. This is normally the responsibility of your web hoster - so make sure you have this area covered.

Of course, you'll want to add new features and funtions to your site over time too, so make sure your web development people take into account the likely expansion of your site, and are flexible enough to work with you on those changes over the coming months and years.

© Copyright 2003-2008 Ausnetech Pty Ltd   A.B.N. 35 104 843 450