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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.
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