Maintaining Your Web Content and Technology

A successful website should be implemented effectively and maintained professionally.

The maintenance factor is absolutely crucial. Although the technology may be outsourced to an Internet service provider, it is the responsibility of the website owner to ensure that the content of the site is accurate and updated regularly. This will help in promoting a positive image for the business, and attracting and retaining visitors to the site on a daily basis.

Website maintenance options - Although you have several options for how maintenance activities on your website are undertaken, there are four main approaches.

Do it yourself: You can carry out the maintenance in-house using a variety of inexpensive tools. These allow you to carry out a range of routine maintenance activities such as validating your site's HTML code and checking for broken links.

Updating a site's content can be time consuming. If you don't have a dedicated webmaster, then you must ensure that the person given responsibility has sufficient time.

Ad-hoc basis: You can pay your Internet service provider (ISP) on an "as required" basis to carry out maintenance and updating activities. This is a viable option if the changes are relatively infrequent. However, as the volume of content on your site grows it will become less cost effective.

Maintenance agreement: The most common approach is to set up a maintenance agreement with your ISP or website developer. This will take account of the need for regular and frequent updates to the content and ongoing checking and monitoring activities. The fee will usually be fixed on a monthly or quarterly basis.

User tools: The final option is provided by an increasing number of suppliers who offer easy-to-use tools, such as simple content management software, that enable end users to update parts of the website themselves. Such tools can be used on their own or as part of a general maintenance contract.

Maintenance budgets: Which ever option you decide to adopt, ensure that you have fully budgeted for it - there will be a charge even for routine updates to your site.

You also need to take account of more significant upgrading or redesigning of the site, which is time consuming and expensive. Assign a budget for more radical changes to the site in addition to the routine maintenance.

An essential part of the overall website maintenance activity is to periodically review the performance of the website, in order to establish whether it is achieving the hoped-for benefits, and help identify areas for potential enhancement.

Evaluate: As part of the evaluation process you should:

• monitor and review the impact on your business against your initial set of targets and objectives
• continue to benchmark your site against those of your competitors and market leaders in order to assess any developments they have made and decide whether these are appropriate for your own site
• get feedback from staff, customers and suppliers on any changes you have made in order to ascertain how well they have been received
• review the success, or otherwise, of any marketing activities you have undertaken

Excerpt was taken from Maintaining Your Web Content and Technology Guide -- Business Link UK - IT & E-commerce Category.