This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 19th, 2007 at 12:29 am and is filed under 8 - Maintenance. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Why do we need to spend time for website maintenance?
Maintaining a website has never been a simple task and some webmasters may be reluctant to do it. But trust us, after your first catastrophic failure… you’ll start embracing it. It is a must-do thing. The best part of a website that draws visitors is the fresh updated relevant contents. It helps in building trust as well. So leaving everything behind, you need to consider content improvement periodically to show your visitors fresh and latest information. Your content must change, and that must lead toward a better site after each update. That is the key for getting return visits.
But that is only part of the story. Actual site maintenance should follow a stipulated schedule and nvolve different actions.
Check for Broken/Dead links:
Think in terms of your visitors. How frustrated will they be, if they find pages containing broken links. When you are reading an article in a website - and in the references part you find more URLs to explore, deeper into the subject; you click one and get an “HTTP 404″ Error Message. You end up frustrated and may even decide not to return back to that site. It may happen to the visitors of your site as well. Whenever they will encounter a broken/dead link, it will cause irritation.
When and how frequent?
If your website is small, once a week will do. There are lots of free tools to check for broken/dead links, so use them and update links accordingly. However for large sites, containing thousands of pages, you need to employ more sophisticated maintenance strategy to check for presence of such undesired links. You may consider checking each section/category periodically instead of checking the entire site as a whole.
Your sitemap should be updated preferably, in particular, each time you add a new page. However, you may consider updating your sitemap once in a week depending upon the gravity of the changes. If you are using Google Sitemap.xml or Yahoo-type “URL-list.txt”, - update it frequently as well.
Whether you are using a content management system, or you have developed one for your own use, database maintenance is a MUST if your site stores content in a database. You need to optimize your tables for performance enhancement from time to time. You may consider changing queries a little bit to show extra information, or adding a field in an existing table or creating a new table altogether to meet up your visitors ever changing needs. Database maintenance, however, requires technical knowledge and attempting any change without knowing the effect may cause irreversible damage to your site.