Website Maintenance

WEB SITE MAINTENANCE

Website maintenance is an essential part of a Webmasters job. A website reflects the company's professional image. If your site has slow loading pages, browser compatibility problems, or broken links, visitors will leave your site and not look back. In contrast, a professional and well-maintained site will make visitors feel more comfortable, stay longer and browse more pages.

The most common problem is slow-loading pages. Visitors get frustrated having to wait for huge files to download. It is generally caused by poor image optimization, excessive resolution, or overuse of graphics. Complex queries against large databases can also increase the load time. Use of too much advertising banners can also make the pages load slowly because they have to come from a different server.

The Webmaster should check that the images are created at no more than 72 dpi (dots per inch). Higher dpi will make the image file size much larger. Never resize your images in the html code. Use an image-editing program like Adobe Photoshop or Macromedia Fireworks to physically resize your photos.

Broken or Dead links are another common problem that reflects poorly on the quality and credibility of your site. They may also result in lowered rankings on search engines. Use a link validator to spider all the links on your site and alert you to ones that may be broken. The spider splits links in two categories, internal, from the same host, and external, outgoing link to different domains. It is very important to remove dead links from your web pages.

Browser compatibilityand display are largely due to different browsers, different browser versions, and browser bugs. The first step to solving these problems is to determine which browsers really matter to you. The inclusion of cutting-edge features in your site also greatly increases the occurrence of browser display errors.

The best way to minimize these problems is to study browser compatibility while creating your pages. Avoid using HTML extensions and be careful about using cutting-edge features. A fundamental rule is to design your pages to work for the last two versions of the major browsers. Resort to trial-and-error debugging to remove the browser bugs.

Website monitoring is a useful way to track traffic and prevent crashes. An intelligent Webmaster can see the danger from an operation slowing down, and can act in time to prevent an all out crash. There are monitoring services available that test website availability, performance, and alert the Webmaster of downtime.

Effective monitoring is the also the best way to get feedback on the success of your website promotion activity. It gives you the most visited pages and the best keywords.

Webmasters should also spend some time to tune server performance in order to make sure that everything is running smoothly at his/her end. This must also include monitoring of Web pages that require Secure Socket Layer connections.

Website maintenance could be a key to your future success, as the design was in the initial stages.