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Maintaining your website
Websites are living entities, requiring regular attention to ensure that they remain up-to-date and in a fully-operational condition. You can’t just leave them to fend for themselves. The regular attention that you give your site is called maintenance. It is very important, because nothing is so damaging to your ebusiness operation than an out-of-date or malfunctioning website.
Unfortunately, maintaining a website over time can be its most costly aspect, depending of course on the nature of its content and functions. Maintenance is resource-hungry and occurs over a much longer period than the construction of the site.
There are three main aspects of website maintenance.
- The website will need to be updated, to ensure that all information is current and useful to users.
- Its technical aspects will need to be checked, to ensure that all aspects of the site continue to function as they were designed to do, for example online forms, hotlinks to other sites.
- It will need to be evaluated, to ensure that it continues to meet the needs of users. This last process will sometimes lead to the introduction of new elements, sections, functions or content.
Your ebusiness plan will need to identify who will be responsible for the maintenance, how it will be carried out (for example using Microsoft's Front Page) and what it will cost.
Obviously, the more complex the site and rich in content the more complex it is to maintain. For some complex sites the use of content editors like FrontPage or Dreamweaver is not the most efficient way to go. In such cases, often the developer who built the site provides a web-based content management system set up especially to manage the content of that site.
Website maintenance is an important issue which must be considered at the business planning stage, costed and tested before the site launch.
What to do
Consult the following online references for more information.
The Managing section of the NOIE ebusinessguide deals in detail with maintaining ebusiness systems.
The CARP Internet development Guide 8. What do I need for my website? deals with website maintenance.
Learn a bit more about content management systems by trying out a live, online demonstration of a content management system offered by an Australian company Websites at Work.
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