Maintaining Your Website

Writen by Tim Priebe

Contrary to what some believe, a web site should definitely not be set up and then forgotten. Over time, information about your company can and will change. If your website remains unchanged, the world will pass it by. A website is not a one-time investment, but something to be cultivated and maintained.

Whether you do the maintenance on your site yourself or have someone else do it for you, you still need to personally review the write-ups on your website every month or two to ensure that they remain accurate. It often helps to get someone else to look at it with you. You may look at it so often that you overlook something, where the other person may see it immediately.

In addition to reviewing the write-up of the site, also make sure that all the links are working. Make sure that they go to the page that you intended them to go to. If they do not, you may need to do a little hunting to find out where they should link to now. Remember, Google and other search engines can help a lot in this process. And if comes down to it, rework that page's content so that the link is not required.

Remove content for events that have long since passed. Keep all the pages with dates on them current. Those types of pages should be checked more often than your other pages.

Also, make sure any forms or other custom programming on your website continues to work. Although any web programs will likely remain unchanged, server upgrades can often cause those programs to no longer work in the way the programmer originally intended. As a frequent programmer myself, I can attest to that.

Finally, make sure you check for any broken images. Hopefully all the images on your site are hosted by you, which can decrease the chance of that happening. Still, you need to make sure that all of the images are there.

Again, even if you have someone else perform the actual work on your site, you are the one that knows your company best. You should be the one checking the site on a regular basis to make sure all information is up-to-date.

Tim is the owner and senior web designer at T&S Web Design. His company has developed and maintained website for dozens of small businesses and organizations. Tim also maintains a blog with free website advice for small business owners, GetASiteOnline.com.