VirtualMV/Web Development/Building Web Site/Monitoring and Maintenance/Content

Introduction

 * Like a house, a website needs regular monitoring and upkeep. Don't make the mistake of assuming that once it's online, it's done.

Monitoring

 * Your web site needs to be monitored, for example, to check that it is actually online and running. This can be done manually, but better to have another system monitoring your site and letting you know when there is a problem.
 * Example: Pingdom

Maintenance

 * 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.
 * Maintenance on a large site can be a full-time job, so build the costs of continuing maintenance into your budget.

Site Maintenance
When maintaining your website always consider what small enhancements can be made, such as:
 * adding further text to what is already there (not just updating) – eg providing better explanations & adding to the number of frequently asked questions
 * adding new images, video, audio – eg providing a video demonstration of a product or artefact
 * providing new content by hotlinking to free streaming content – eg news, time and weather feeds
 * adding new links – eg adding to the hotlinks to other sites and providing expanded explanations about the hotlinks
 * promoting more aggressively – eg registering the site with search engines that you have never registered with before, increasing the number of reciprocal links with other sites.

Technical Maintenance

 * monitoring the speed of the site
 * hotlinks to other sites – eg validity of the hotlinks
 * the reliability of the web server – includes dealing with error reports from the web server
 * the speed and reliability of information derived from the database
 * email lists – includes removing faulty email addresses
 * user sessions, hits and traffic through the site
 * the exporting of data collected from online forms to the appropriate personnel
 * the integrity and performance of the e-commerce system, if applicable