Guide to maintaining Your Website
Like a house, a website needs regular upkeep. Don't make the mistake of assuming that once it's online, it's done.
If you want people to return to your site, someone will have to add new content and update existing material; there's e-mail to answer, links to check, and perhaps usage statistics to track. For a small site, this can take as little as two or three hours a month. Larger sites can be time intensive, or perhaps you simply don't have enough html knowledge to handle small changes yourself. Website maintenance is necessary, regardless of whether you do it yourself, or hire a professional to look after it for you.
Updating for a small site may take as little as a couple of hours a month. On a large site, this may be a full-time job. Be sure to incorporate the costs of maintenance into your budget during the planning phase so it doesn't take you by surprise. If you're planning a large, ambitious site or want to gradually add more content and functionality to it, working with an experienced designer and programmer from the outset will save you a lot of time later on. Starting with a well-designed site is the most effective way to prevent extensive updates and maintenance. Experienced web developers average about US $75 per hour and up. This may sound steep, but it is well worth the cost if you want to incorporate advanced features like Flash animation, forms, or search tools.
Updating a site often means changing the content. This may be as simple as checking links to other sites to make sure they are current, or as complex as adding new capability to forms. The cost of keeping a website current and operational depends on the size and complexity of the site and how often it needs to be updated.
Remember, adding new content doesn't necessarily mean scrapping the old. Some kinds of dated material like press releases, software updates, articles or transcripts of speeches can be useful and should be archived. Make sure that archived information is easy to access.
Your Strategy. Start by deciding how often you need or want to update your site and how extensive those updates will be. For example, a news publisher will likely update information on a daily basis, in some cases, even hourly. A retailer may update its site whenever there is new merchandise and for special sales and promotions.
Next, pay attention to what your users are doing and saying. How many people are visiting your site and where are they going? There are ways of tracking which pages of your site are being frequented. If your site is hosted by a web hosting service, it should supply you with detailed and timely reports. A number of shareware and commercial software programs are available to people who run their own servers. Many give you information in real time as to who is on your website, where they come from, which pages they access, and a lot more.
Provide a way for users to give feedback. The most common method is via e-mail. Use that information to identify and resolve any problems. Use comments about the site along with usage tracking data to guide your decisions about what content to keep, replace, or improve.
If you're pressed for time or resources, maintaining a simple database of all your pages, including a brief description of each page's content, related links and graphics files, can be very helpful. As your site grows, or if you hand over maintenance to someone else, the database will come in handy.
Until now, the primary form of communication between businesses and their customers was through advertising and marketing materials. This doesn't offer much opportunity for interaction or feedback. All that has changed with the World Wide Web, effectively opening the door to ongoing, two-way communication. With the type of fast-paced interaction made possible via the Web, peoplerightfully expect to be able to engage in immediate "conversation" with a company, especially about its products and services.
Ongoing interaction with customers and potential customers can help improve your product and the way you communicate product benefits, gather customer testimonials, and provide customer service. Many organizations with websites have been surprised by the volume and frequency of online feedback they receive from customers.
Although this poses challenges for most companies, it also offers an terrific opportunity to collect important consumer information, as well as immediate feedback regarding products and marketing efforts. |
