Company
Website Maintenance
Company Website Maintenance
As the internet grows in its popularity and your company in its
reach, merging both successes become fruitful when the presence
on the internet is firmly established. Your company's web site could
have been launched as a first time experiment or as a fully blown
e-commerce venture, both cases of presence need to be sustained
over a long period of time.
The need for your company web site maintenance arises, for reasons
of sustaining it in the face of so many risks it faces on the internet.
Company web site maintenance is normally undertaken by it's own
IT or EDP division or by an external agency specializing in this
area of information technology.
The risks could arise from so many unethical and untoward practices
on the internet propagated by destructive hackers or intellectual
property thieves. Company web site maintenance is a relatively new
concept and practice covering the following areas:
Content Updates:
This function deals with updating the current content including
company information, personal information and any other textual
content of the web site. Content update may also include insertion
of new graphics within the text, especially for sites that publish
regular articles or columns.
The content updates usually depend upon the industry in which the
company operates, design of the website and the variety of audience
it addresses. For example, if the company is a newspaper publishing
company, updates may be daily or hourly or if the company is a BPO,
updates may be needed on a weekly basis.
Traffic Report Analysis :
To assess the success of your web site and to evaluate the same,
the traffic needs to be measured. Traffic is the amount of hits
your web site receives from various sources on a day to day basis.
Analysis of these reports and their outcome affects the company
web site maintenance function highly.
Since these reports will tell you what pages of your site are more
popular and which kinds of people visit it. Revamping the site as
per these reports will greatly help in ensuring that your company
web site is promoted properly.
Image Optimization:
Images on your company's web site occupy most disk space. Optimizing
these images is one way of making sure that they load faster on
the visitor's browser's page. Therefore image optimization is a
major part of company web site maintenance because it directly affects
the loading speeds and performance of your web site. Image optimization
is normally done during the initial site design but when you add
new graphics to your site, they have to be optimized again to ensure
that they load faster in the browser.
Web Site Promotion:
After your company has uploaded and launched the web site through
necessary fan fare, the question of marketing your web site comes
into the picture. This is also known as web site promotion which
is simply marketing. When you open a new store front you need to
have a plan or a way to attract potential and new customers.
Your company's website, if made for promoting business, is an electronic
storefront, therefore the same policy applies to a web site. The
objective of creating a web site was to share information with the
rest of the world. But the world will never know that your site
exists if you don't inform them. Using simple web site promotion
techniques and tools, a marketing campaign can be put in place which
will drive constant flow of visitors to your site.
Web Server Maintenance:
A web server is the computer where your web site resides. Unless
your company has a very hi tech IT installation consisting of data
center or intranet, the chances are that the web server space has
been leased form a third party and you have remote access to it.
The hosting provider, or the company that leases out space for your
web site, owns and manages the data center, handles most of the
technical maintenance related to your web site.
Most hosting companies give you a limited access to your web server
using a web-based control panel. The most routine part of server
maintenance is that you may be required to monitor disk space, data
transfers and efficient performance. Doing so will ensure that your
web site is performing at proper and efficient performance levels.
This part of company web site maintenance is relatively easy and
is a periodic chore.
Content Archival:
If your company has dynamic content and it changes constantly like
e-zines, portals or news sites, you must put in place a mechanism
to archive older content and make sure that it is available on upon
request. These kinds of web sites are usually database driven and
one needs to be updated on data driven technologies to efficiently
perform this part of company web site maintenance operations. A
requirement of specialist is not ruled out since this is a time
consuming and a seriously responsible job profile in company web
site maintenance industry.
Link Validation:
Link validation is a typical part of all or most company web site
maintenance services. It includes microscopic scanning all the pages
of the company web site to ensure that there are no non-working
or dead links. Several software programs are available that do this
automatically by reporting any dead or missing links at the end.
It may be easy, but a very essential part of company web site maintenance.
Link Popularity :
In a bid to popularize your company's web site, it has to be marketed
in such a way that it should be placed at the top of search engines.
This practice is also called search engine optimization and link
popularity becomes very important in search engine placement. In
short link popularity is the measure of the number of incoming and
outgoing links on your website. The more links your company web
site has, the better it will rank in search engines. Therefore,
this also underlines the importance of company web site maintenance
in regard to link validation.
Layout Changes :
This new dimension of company web site maintenance is really not
a maintenance job, but is a revamping job. It is important that
the differentiation between content update and layout changes comes
to the fore because content update is just changing the content
as per time or incidents and is a regular part of the company web
site maintenance process, whereas layout changes are not typically
included in most company web site maintenance packages.
Layout changes are changes to the overall design and structure
of the web site or a particular page which may include addition
of new graphics, re-designing or enhancing existing such as adding
flash movies or sounds.
The objective of any company web site maintenance program is to
keep the web site appealing, up-to-date and to attract and retain
visitors. Company web site maintenance is a full-time and highly
responsible job, especially for web sites that have constantly changing
content. Also, being a very highly technical job, a lot of software
tools have come up to automate the process, but the uniqueness of
each web site does not aid the automation fully.
More at http://www.cyberdias.com
About the Author John Argy has been involved
with development, promotion, maintenance and hosting on the web
for more than 12 years. http://www.cyberdias.com
|
