Basic rules for web site management

Oct 15, 2007 17:26 GMT  ·  By

When you have finalized the design of a web site and you have added content to it, you might consider the job done. You can say that this is just the beginning. You will always have to change certain parts of the content, such as text, images, links, to modify keywords or meta tags, upload various files, delete old web pages and more.

In order to be able to assure the simplest and efficient ways to perform the maintenance of your web site, you should have a good method of content separation from presentation and web site design (structure). The easy control of content, presentation and site structure can be obtained by using templates or content management systems. In this way you will rapidly update the content for a news web site or a blog for example.

You should organize your files (images, audio or video files) in different subfolders of the main directory of your web site to simplify their searching, as compared to the situation if they are mixed in a single directory with HTML files and scripts. You must always have a backup for the edited web page or for the entire site, if something goes wrong in the update procedure.

Periodically you must check the links' validity if you have inserted other sites' URLs in your web pages. Broken links will display an error message which will determine the actual visitors of your web sites to avoid it due to this cause.

There are many free online link validators that will help you identify the existing broken links. You must also check the period of time when your web site is online and your web site traffic statistics. By analyzing the data you will obtain useful information which will indicate you what parts of your web site or structure features should be updated or deleted.

A visual online HTML editor can also reduce the time needed for updating your web content. If you perform actions of website maintenance periodically, you will notice an improvement of your page rank value and the web site traffic.