Basic 17 Essential Web Site Maintenance Strategies

The following Website features are the most important:

1. Quality of content.
2. Fast download time.
3. Ease of use and navigation.

When it’s time to maintain your site considers these design tips:

1. Create a HTML template for your Website which contains all of the items that normally appears on every page of your site. Make sure your HTML code for the page includes: DOCTYPE, Meta data, your standard images, headers, footers, links, navigation scheme, etc. This will save you time, and ensure that all of all pages start with the same format.
2. Keep your audience in mind when you update your pages and/or add new pages. Use your referrer tracking data to get to know more about your visitors.
3. Spend your time developing content, not bells and whistles.
4. Use light colored background colors with text color(s) that has a high contrast to your background.
5. Minimize the number of graphics on each page. Do not use more than two animated links per page. Optimize your graphics and always include Alt, Width and Height Tags with your image tags.
6. Use only browser-safe colors on your site.
7. Design your Website to fit all resolutions. Plus, test the most often used browsers.
8. If you change or add text to a page make sure you spell check the page.
9. Use a link checker and make sure your hyper-links are still valid once a month.
10. Make sure all your external links contains a description of the linked site.
11. On each page, ensure your visitors can provide you feedback, report broken links or advise you of other problems.
12. Website is never finished. But, do not use under construction signs!
13. Frames. My advice, don’t use them.
14. Broken links will annoy visitors making them click elsewhere off your site, thus losing a potential customer. Businesses that once linked to your site may have closed down, thus causing broken links to appear. Check for broken links on your site at least once a month.
15. The number and type of keywords used to search for information on your site can change dramatically. Without constantly monitoring your web site rankings, you may wonder why your sales have dropped. One must stay up to date with search engine changes. Adjust your site accordingly then resubmit it to the search engines if needed.
16. You may be getting a lot of hits/visitors to your site but no one is buying. Your web copy could be at fault. Try rewriting it by placing yourself in your customer’s shoes. Focus primarily on the benefits of your product. Sometimes changing one or two lines can increase the percentage of sales from your site.
17. The site statistics provided by your web host, you can monitor the amount of visits to each page, where they came from and what keywords they used to find your web site. You may then need to optimize other pages targeting alternative keywords to increase the number of visitors arriving at your site.