Tips For Managing Your Website

	Maintaining a website requires more than just keeping it "live".

It's a regular occurrence for an employee or business owner to be handed the task of running and maintaining a website when another employee leaves or the firm that was running the site moves on to other projects.

ToTheWeb often maintains the sites we build, however we know that sometimes the site owner wants to handle it on their own. With that in mind, we offer these words of advice for those new to website maintenance, which is much more than just keeping the site live!

	Backups — ensuring that your website files are backed up frequently is critical. Don't rely on your web host to do it for you! They usually don't do backups frequently enough. Keep a copy of your website on your local computer and back it up regularly. That way, if your web server crashes, and it's been a month since the server was backed up, you can quickly restore your site to show your most up-to-date content.
	Download before updating — before revising a web page, download the page from the live site to your local system to ensure you have the latest version of the page (and don't forget to check for new/revised graphic files as well). Then make the changes and upload them to the web server.
	Link checking — if your website has outbound links (and most do) these links should be checked regularly in case the URL on the destination website has changed. Consider using Xenu's Link Sleuth but keep in mind that no link checker is perfect.
	Maintain the site style — when updating a web page, be sure and maintain the site "look and feel". Modern websites have font and layout styles defined in a "stylesheet" file, so be sure and learn how CSS (cascading style sheets) work and use them.
	Maintain file names — if a PDF file is replaced with a newer one, keep the file name the same so that links to the file do not have to be revised, the search engines will not need to update their indexes, and "page not found" errors will be avoided.
	Maintain search engine optimization features — every modern website that wants to rank well in the search engines natural search results has been "search engine optimized". That means that throughout the site, keyword search terms have been used in a variety of ways to optimize page ranking in the search engines. If those terms are altered or replaced, that may negatively impact site ranking. If you have to revise the content on a web page, do not alter the embedded search terms without carefully considering the consequences.
	Check your changes in multiple browsers — different web browsers can and regularly do interpret the same HTML differently! Every time you make a change to a web page, view the page in Windows IE, Netscape, and Firefox, and also in Mac Firefox, Safari, and Netscape. You do not want to have your website visitors seeing a messed up page layout anymore than you want one person to see a company brochure printed with the colors out of register.
	Learn HTML — WYSIWIG web editors like FrontPage and Dreamweaver have a lot of cool features but they are not perfect. There is no substitute for learning HTML and being able to work directly with the code when the web editors can't do something you want done or they produce results that look bad in some browsers.