Building a website isn"t a one-time deal. Your website is an asset, so you"ve got to look after it. Just like your vehicles and your buildings, your website needs service and maintenance.
It is not unusual for a business to buy their own vehicles - sometimes lots of them. But it is unusual for those businesses to employ full-time mechanics to maintain them - everybody knows: car maintenance is a specialist skill which is generally outsourced. Again, businesses buy buildings and real estate, but (apart from an estate manger) it"s very unusual for them to engage their own building contractors.
And yet, even after paying a consultant to build their website for them, it"s common for companies to try to handle their own website maintenance. In fact, maintaining a website can account for 90% of the cost of ownership - sometimes much more if the DIY-website mechanic isn"t up to the job!
This short guide can help you plan your website maintenance, and to highlight some of the alternatives to doing-it-yourself. Welcome to the "You.com Owner"s Manual".
Service Intervals summary:
Daily: Backups and Logfiles
Weekly: Logfiles and Content
Monthly: Content and Links
Quarterly: Cleanup
Backups
Everybody has heard of unfortunate souls whose life"s work was wiped out by a fire or a computer failure. You need to protect yourself, so that when your crisis happens it doesn"t become a disaster. And the best way to protect your business is: take regular back-ups.
What should you back up?
Everything!
* Your website: You"ve paid a lot of money for it. You need to own it, so you need a complete copy of it. If your server ever fails, you"ll need it to get back on-line without delay.
* Your databases: financial records, mailing lists, orders, and so on. They change daily, and if you ever lost them, your business would grind to a halt..
* Your email records. Most of your email will be expendable, but some items may be contractual, and some may be needed if there"s ever a legal complaint against you.
These are just suggestions to get you started. Look at your own operation, and make a list of the data you use and generate. And then work out - how long could you last if you lost it?
How often should you back-up?
As often as you need! You will write your website just once, so you only need to back that up one time. But if you"re regularly updating your content, probably you"ll need to back-up those parts more frequently. If you lose a week"s worth of content you"ll be able to reconstruct it fairly easily, so weekly backups are adequate. But current data like emails is different. Losing a week"s worth of emails could be very serious, so, you"ll need to back those up at least every day. And you"ll probably want to make duplicate copies of every financial transaction at the same time as they"re made - you wouldn"t want to lose a single one of those!
Managing your backups.
There"s no doubt, backing-up is a chore! Somebody must remember to do it, and you"ve got to make sure that all your data is stored securely and then removed from the site (you wouldn"t want your back-ups to go up in the same smoke as your original data, would you?)
If you don"t want to shoulder the responsibility of taking your own back-ups, there is always the option of using a remote back-up service. You can set up your website to send safety copies of all your transactions to a secure server for safekeeping. Then, every night or every weekend (or whatever other interval you choose), they can securely download your entire database onto their servers.
Logfiles
Every time somebody visits your website, every time somebody reads a page, there"s a note made in the logfiles. And that record, that "paper" trail, is a mine of information - if you know how to read it!
Hackers
Hackers find their way into your computers by testing, probing, and pushing to find a weakness. Every time they do that, there will be a fault recorded in your logfile. Certain kinds of fault just shout "Hacker" - and if you know someone is trying to get in, you"ll know exactly how to protect your system.
You should check for hacker activity daily. Or let us check for you.
Traffic
The logfiles record not just who visited your site, but what they looked at and how they moved from page to page. They even record how they reached your site - what search engines they were using, and which search terms.
This kind of information is solid gold to your Content Maintenance team! Are there pages which your visitors don"t understand? Are there products that they"re particularly interested in? Is there some new way of promoting your offers which you hadn"t though of?
You should be checking your logfiles weekly, if only to see whether the number visitors you"re getting is rising or falling. But you should certainly use your logfiles as part of your content generation policy - what do you need to add? What do you need to clarify? What has passed it"s sell-by date?
Content
Here"s an interesting fact: Research has shown that most web users have a stock of about 14 websites that they keep going back to.
That"s not to say that they don"t surf all over the web. They do! It"s just that - in most cases - they"ll look at most sites just once, and then never go back.
It seems that, even with technological support, human beings can"t manage more than about 14 favourite anythings.
Few visitors will respond to you on the first visit - there"s too many distractions on the Internet. So most visits to your site will be useless to you - no matter how much traffic you get, nothing will happen unless you can induce your first-timers to return, over and over again.
In order to become someone"s favourite you"ll need to keep supplying new content. Just like a magazine which needs to fill a new issue every month, to secure your visitors" loyalty you"ll need to keep delivering new things to do, new things to read, or new things to buy.
You have three core content management tasks:
* You need to either create - or buy-in - new content regularly.
* You need to update your website with that content.
* You need to let your regulars know that the new content is there.
How frequently should you provide this new content? It depends on your business, of course - but usually either weekly or monthly is about right. More frequently than once a week is likely to be interpreted as pestering (unless it"s bang-up-to-the-moment information like stock prices). Less than once a month, and your visitors will have forgotten about you.
Inbound links.
Your website doesn"t exist in isolation. It"s part of the enormous ecosystem that is the World Wide Web. And your connection to that ecosystem is links. Specifically, inbound links - that is, the links that other people place on their sites pointing their visitors towards you..
Inbound links are important for two reasons:
* They are part of how search engines rate you - Google calls it "Page rank". Good quality links from good quality websites raise your profile. Poor quality links from weak sites reduce it.
* Every inbound link means that somebody is talking about you. Being talked about is good - but surely you want to know what they"re saying?
Every month or so, you should survey what links are pointing towards your site.
* Are you getting attention in the places you"d hope to? Is your marketing working for you?
* Are there opinions or comments circulating about you which you need to know about - good or bad?
* Are you being link-farmed or stuffed? Do you need to repair your Page rank?
To help with your marketing and SEO efforts, The Webgineers can provide you with a regular report, detailing all your inbound links, analysing the changes month-by-month, and providing specific recommendations to improve your search rankings and your marketing results.
Cleanup
Spring-clean
As you"ve seen, a website is a living thing - never finished, never still. So it"s not surprising that it accretes junk:
* Links from pages on your site to pages that have disappeared (either your pages have disappeared or other peoples" have),
* Pages on your site which nobody cares about any more. Expired offers, technical help for obsolete products, and so on.
* Pages which are no longer linked-to by any pages in your site, but still exist on your server, and still have inbound links.
It"s worthwhile, every few months, to have a general clear-out - to cut away the dead wood and make sure that your website is still working the way you"d hope. Now - where are those logfies?
Decoration
Fashions come and go: what looked great last year might look hopelessly old-fashioned today - and the more striking the design, the more perishable it is! So, once every year or two, you should review the graphic design and the structure of your website. Compare your site with others in similar fields. Is your design still fresh, is it distinct - or is it starting to look a little tired and threadbare?
Just like redecorating a house, modernising a website shouldn"t be a huge, disruptive operation. Actually, small adjustments are far better, because your regular visitors like familiarity. Google, for example, has been fiddling with its (very simple, minimalist design) since the day it opened - take a look it its history on the Wayback Machine.
While you"re reviewing your decoration, it"s also worthwhile taking the opportunity to review the purpose of your website. Is it still doing what you want it to do? Have your business objectives altered in the last year? It"s much easier to "get the builders in" once a year to extend and enlarge your website than it is to construct a complete new website when you"ve got no choice! It"s also much cheaper!