VirtualMV/Web Development/Web Site Management/Site Maintenance/Content

Overview

By the end of this page you will be able to: Understand the need for and processes involved in Site Maintenance

When maintaining your website always consider what small enhancements can be made, such as:

• adding further text to what is already there (not just updating) – eg providing better explanations & adding to the number of frequently asked questions
• adding new images, video, audio – eg providing a video demonstration of a product or artefact

providing new content by hotlinking to free streaming content – eg news, time and weather feeds

• adding new links – eg adding to the hotlinks to other sites and providing expanded explanations about the hotlinks
• promoting more aggressively – eg registering the site with search engines that you have never registered with before, increasing the number of reciprocal links with other sites.

Technical Maintenance

A technical maintenance list might include :

• the speed of the site
• hotlinks to other sites – eg validity of the hotlinks
• the reliability of the web server – includes dealing with error reports from the web server
• the speed and reliability of information derived from the database
• email lists – includes removing faulty email addresses
• user sessions, hits and traffic through the site
• the exporting of data collected from online forms to the appropriate personnel
• the integrity and performance of the e-commerce system, if applicable

Issues that can arise after maintenance

From: Help Desk 
Sent: 7 April 2014 10:09 a.m.
To: Help Desk
Subject: Lync Contacts
 
Good morning all,
 
Unfortunately the Lync upgrade that occurred over the weekend has 
meant that you will need to re-add your Lync contacts.  
We apologise for this and have detailed below how to add them back on both a PC and Mac.
...

Think of this from a user point of view where the contacts may have been built up over several years and may be both internal & external.

Budgeting for maintenance

• The cost of maintaining your website over a 12 month period needs to be estimated and the money allocated so that the website has every chance of achieving its goals.
• Many businesses make the mistake of only considering the cost of developing a new website and forget the cost of annual maintenance.
• For some businesses the maintenance costs are not high, for others they can far exceed the development cost. No matter what the cost, annual budgeting for maintenance is very important.
• The website budget should be considered along with everything else at budget time. It might be listed as a unique item in the overall budget and given its own allocation.