Maintaining Your Site

It's one thing to build a great site, but another thing to keep it great month after month, and this is an area in which a lot of sites fall short. All sites need to be updated often, but sites with different objectives have different reasons for doing so, and may need different tools.

If your site exists to provide information, keep that information up to date, and make it clear to your users when it's updated. In today's rush-rush world, old information is often useless information. Just about every Web page should have a date, indicating when the material was last reviewed and (if necessary) updated. Even if nothing has changed, you may wish to note the date at which you reviewed the material and determined that nothing needed to be changed. Of course, some sites, such as those in the academic field, and intra- and extranet sites, may want to provide much more information about updates, such as who updated the page and exactly what has been changed.

All "content" sites should plan to be updated continuously. Particularly for ad-supported sites, a steady flow of new content is the only way to keep those page views rolling in. For sites with a lot of content, simply coding and loading new material may be too slow and clumsy. One of the advantages of a dynamic site is that it makes adding new content much easier. Large content sites will probably want to go with some kind of dynamic system, or even a content-management system such as StoryServer.

Sites with advertising need not only to change their content regularly, but their ads too. It's well known that the clickthrough rate on an online ad begins to decline quickly soon after it's placed into service. The most successful ad campaigns change the "creative" often, and use customer feedback to design new campaigns whenever possible. Of course, this sort of thing is usually the province of an ad agency, so Webmasters don't necessarily get involved. However, if you use "house" ads, be sure to change them often. In fact, any on-site link between related sections of your site can be considered an ad in a way, so keep track of what people are clicking (and not clicking) on and change things around occasionally.

For an e-commerce site, keeping content up to the minute is an absolutely critical task. For a site with a large catalog, it can be a monumental one. The prices, product details and availability posted on your site had better be the same as the ones in the back office, or you've got big problems. If you sell someone a widget online for fifteen bucks, only to find that the supplier raised the price to twenty bucks and forgot to update the Web site, then you have no choice but to eat the fiver. If you tell someone that widgets are in stock, and take their order, then later realize that they're out of stock and must be backordered, then you have probably lost a customer permanently. In the instant-gratification world of e-commerce, consumers have little patience with mistakes, and they won't return to an online merchant that screwed up their order.

If you have a large catalog, then it's obvious that simply updating product info manually will never do. This is one of those situations where you need a database-enabled Web site. Or rather, if you're dealing with a pre-existing store, the name of the game is to Web-enable their existing database. This opens up a can of worms as far as security, compatibility, and the high cost of database consultants, but it's the optimal solution. The alternative is to devise some sort of automated system for updating the Web database in batches periodically, but this means that data on the Web site won't be updated instantaneously, and may lead to problems.

If your site is selling products from several different vendors, good luck! Keeping prices and other product information up to date with different suppliers, who use different databases or none at all, can be a Herculean task, only to be conquered by rigorous organization. Establish a logical schedule for updates, and make sure your suppliers understand the dire consequences of falling behind.

Conclusion

If you address your Internet strategy with a strong sense of purpose, you won't go far wrong. Here are a few parting quips to stick to your refrigerator.

• Make sure that everyone in your organization understands the objectives of your Web site, and keep them firmly in mind at every stage of site build and maintenance.
• Don't be tempted to implement site features for their own sake.
• Don't compare your site to others that may have different goals.
• Judge the success of your site, or a particular site feature, by how well it serves your objectives. Measure results as precisely as possible.

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