You‘re driving down the road and notice that your car‘s oil level warning light is on. What do you do?
- Find a gas station and have more oil put in your engine.
- Take a screw driver an punch out that annoying little light so you don‘t have to look at it anymore.
Your car needs periodic maintenance and punching out a light won‘t make a problem go away.
It surprises some website owners to learn that their website need maintenance as well and maybe it would be a good thing if there were a little red light that would warn us when something on our site needed attention.
There isn‘t, so we have to be proactive.
The reason most site owners never consider maintenance to their site is that most of the time, a site will hum right along without any attention. Brochure-style sites that only present web pages fall into this category as well as most conventionally designed sites.
However - that does not mean that no maintenance is ever required. There are things that might be going on that the original designer and site owner never suspected.
Every website should be reviewed annually by a web savvy maintainer. The following should be done - need it or not.
- Check to make sure that the site has not be compromised to send out SPAM or Phishing messages.
This almost happened to one of our very old clients, but an annual review caught the fact that there was a folder and software on the site that wasn‘t part of the original installation! It is becoming increasingly commonplace for "break-ins" to a site to occur as hackers become more sophisticated. A reminder: you are responsible for your website and everything that goes on within it (wanted or not).
- Clean out any temporary work files or other deadwood that might accumulate as part of the website‘s functionality.
Programs created by HirMon & Associates are sensitive to clutter and, most of the time, there isn‘t much to do here. Our programs cleanup after themselves. Still, the ocassional program hiccup and other factors can leave junk files on a system and they need to be removed to conserve disk space.
- Backup any database or other data files.
The longest period of time between these backups is 1 year. If the site is very active, then monthly or even weekly backups might be appropriate to prevent losing data. Along with data backups, it‘s also a good idea to run diagnostic tools to check databases (or other files) for errors.
- Check the email system on the website to insure that it is working properly.
Again, removal of extraneous files (mostly SPAM) will free disk space and can improve performance of a site. It is also a good idea to check all mailboxes and any email forwarding to insure that the destination addresses are still valid.
- Download the entire website to a local PC and burn the files to a CD.
Any competent designer will tell you that this might not be necessary. After all, they should have a copy of the website available on their development PC. We still thing this is necessary, because we know for a fact that development copies of a website never really quite match up with what is actually on the site (heck, we are website developers and should know). Taking this approach insures that you do, in fact, have an exact copy of your site and if your hosting services disappears or there is some other reason for reinstalling the website - you know you have a good copy for reinstallation.
- Check your domain name registration.
As noted in the article Domain Name Hell - your site might be present, but if the domain name expires - no one can get to it.
- For the site owner: They need to go through every page on their website and check the information for accuracy and to insure it is still current.
Site owners using our Page Content Management System rarely have to do this, because they can update key information on-the-spot. But other site owners are not so lucky. They have to rely on a third-party service to make changes to their site. List all the changes and arrange to get them done.
- Check the copyright date (if there is one) to insure it shows the correct year.
This is a notation that usually appears on pages that says something like: Copyright 20xx ABC Company. All rights reserved.
Any - checking that date might sound like the stupidest piece of "make work" ever invented, but it isn‘t. A year notation that is more than 1 year off might make visitors wonder if you are still in business. Don‘t laugh! It happens! HirMon sites don‘t suffer this problem because the date(s) shown are generated dynamically and are always correct.
Those are some of the main things to look for and just about every site has its own quirks and pecularities that need to be added as well.
Not surprisingly, our clients that elected to have their sites hosted through HirMon & Associates can focus on their business. Our subscription includes all these details at no additional charge.
