Internet technology has progressed by leaps and bounds resulting in number of websites being launched on the internet. When the website gets firmly established on the net your success is determined. Irrespective of the objectives of your website, it has to be maintained.
There are myriad reasons why the websites need to be maintained. Your website is your company's profile on the net which helps in converting your site visitor into your customer. It is essential to maintain this profile on the net.
The websites are subjected to cyber crimes like phishing, spamming, spreading viruses, fooling around with people's personal accounts etc. which are instigated by destructive hackers. In order to deal with these anti social elements maintaining the websites have become imperative. Company websites are generally maintained by their own IT department or EDP division. Some times the work is outsourced to companies who specialize in the domain of maintaining websites.
There are several factors that are considered while maintaining the website.
Website traffic:
To understand the popularity of your site it is necessary to analyze the site traffic. Site traffic relates to the hits received daily by your website from different sources. This report gives an in depth analyses of pages on your site that are more popular and also tells you about the sources from where it is being visited. Based on these reports the website can be refurbished ensuring apt site promotion.
Link Validation:
Link validation is the most common part of web maintenance regimen. This includes checking all the links on your website ensuring that they all are in working condition. Having dead links gives a bad impression to your site.
Revising Content:
Content on any website is updated on regular basis depending on the type of industry and variety of visitors. Details like new address, phone number etc are regularly updated irrespective of the industry type. A company needs to make these minor but important additions to their existing content. Generally article publishing sites add graphics to their websites.
Optimizing the Images:
Images make websites more attractive. However these images take up lot of space on the website. To ensure the image downloads faster on the visitors page maintenance is essential. Optimizing the images is highly necessary as it affects the loading speed and the performance of the website.
Link Popularity:
This is done by search engine optimization or SEO. SEO relates to exchanging links with other websites of related domain. Link popularity is measured on the basis of the incoming and outgoing links on your website. Greater the number of links on your website, higher is the page rank. Maintenance helps in make the website more search engine friendly.
Content Archival:
Article or newsletter websites are rich in content. These sites should a mechanism by which old content gets archived and is available on request. These websites have huge database of content which has to be managed accordingly. This is done through web site maintenance. However in this case people specializing in maintaining databases are required. This is highly significant and time consuming job profile of website maintenance.
Web Server Maintenance:
Server is the home of your website. Most of the companies have third party hosting their websites. The hosting company handles the technical maintenance of your company. The routine maintenance of your server includes monitoring disk space, data transfer and efficient performance. This type of maintenance is a regular affair and quite easy to undertake.
Changing Layouts:
Layout changing is not a normal routine of website maintenance. Layout changing includes changing the entire design and the structure of the website of either the homepage or any particular pages. They may include additional graphics, flash, images, content etc.
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.
The focus of maintaining a website is to keep it looking fresh, up dated and appealing to its visitors. Maintaining a website is a highly serious business as you deal with a company's entire persona on the net.
