Website Maintenance - Is it important and why.?

We look at the importance placed upon maintaining your website, and the reasoning behind the do's and don'ts, we also look at why if your not into webmastering or maintaining your own site why you should employ a company that excels in this field.

What Does Website Maintenance Mean To My Company.?

In a nutshell, if you have neither the time nor experience to update, upgrade or implement changes to your site, then chances are your potential or current clients will be reading / viewing outdated or unimportant information that can or could be detrimental to your business operations. Many sites often change the look and feel of their site, they often change filing systems around and forget important information to be linked or unlinked, they forget to delete files that will still be linked in search engines.

Important updates are often neglected or get forgotten about, thus creating problems especially if your customers are seeking up to date information.

Website maintenance is much like running a car, if you don't put oil, water and petrol into the car it won't run, if you don't service your car chances are it will run rough and sluggish, exactly how a website operates, if you forget the maintenance it WILL run sluggish most likely chewing up resources or accessing non existent pages etc..So rather than crossing your fingers and hoping nothing goes wrong, take action now and engage a professional to alleviate that potential stressful situation from arising.

As part of our services here at Media IT Solutions Australia we have several levels of Web Maintenance that suits all types of clients:

> Pay as you go maintenance - pay by the hour
> Yearly subscription - regular overview and report system to client
> Non Urgent Service - Paid by the hour at a lower rate for non urgent procedures
> Urgent Servicing - done within 24 hours, charges are slightly higher than normal hourly rate.

Contact Us to see how we can benefit your business and increase productivity.

Below is a good overview how maintaining your site is crucial:

Maintaining your website

Websites are entities, requiring regular attention to ensure that they remain up-to-date and in a fully-operational condition. The regular attention that you give your site is called maintenance. It is very important, because nothing is so damaging to your business operation than an out-of-date or malfunctioning website, if your customers come to a malfunctioning site or out of date site, chances are you will lose that customer for good, customers are finicky when it comes to online habits.

Unfortunately, maintaining a website can be its most costly aspect, over time, depending, of course, on the nature of its content and functions. It is resource hungry and occurs over a much longer period than the construction of the site.

There are three main aspects of website maintenance:

1) The website will need to be updated, to ensure that all information is current and useful to users.
2) Its technical aspects will need to be checked, to ensure that all aspects of the site continue to function as they were designed to do, for example online forms, surveys, forums and links to other sites.
3) It will need to be evaluated on a constant basis, to ensure that it continues to meet the needs of users. This last process will sometimes lead to the introduction of new elements, sections, functions or content.

Your business will need to identify who will be responsible for the maintenance, be it someone in-house or an outside company that excels in this field as well as how it will be carried out and what it will cost.

Obviously, the more complex the site and rich in content the more complex it is to maintain. In such cases, often the developer who built the site provides a web-based content management system set up especially to manage the content of that site.

Website maintenance is an important issue, which must be considered at the business planning stage, costed and tested before the site launch.

* Error pages like this on your site can be damaging to your online business.

Below is a helpful guide for your maintenance issues

Content Maintenance Checklist

FIRST RULE - KEEP IT CURRENT
> Check for broken links
> Identify dateable content and assign staff to regularly check this content
> Set up a system of updating this dateable content (include images)
- a network of regular 'informers' who can inform you of happenings/changes
- make sure whole site is updated
> Check for duplicated content and eliminate
> Always think 'promotions'
> Events/news you can promote on your home page
> Delete anything obsolete (they are still picked up by the search engine) - files, images, logos
> Keep a history of changes to content
> Do periodic clean-ups of your files and folders
> Do random tests on forms and other interactive facilities in your site
> Do random printouts of pages
> Do random searches for content in your site
> Check redirects (eg should they be extended, etc)
> Identify areas of change/growth and plan accordingly
> Keep your knowledge current