Inevitably there are a number of little, and not so little,
website administrative and maintenance tasks that are hard to
find time to tackle during the year. That's why we recommend
performing an annual review of your site. To help get you
started and get your site in shape for the New Year, here is
POP's Annual Website Maintenance Checklist.
1. Review Your Domain Name Record
Don't let outdated information cause you to miss renewals
and other important notices. Verify that the contact
names and addresses on your domain record are correct
once a year. Use these resources to review your domain
record now:
- InterNIC[http://www.internic.net/whois.html]
- VeriSign[http://www.networksolutions.com/en_US/whois/]
2. Check Website Email Addresses
If your company has had organizational changes over the
past year, and whose hasn't, you could have invalid email
addresses on your site. Make a list of all the email
addresses on your site and confirm that they're still
active.
3. Update Your Confirmation and Automated Messages
If the automated messages from your registration, request,
order and other forms have not been updated this year,
it's time to review them. These messages can be powerful
customer relations tools, but only if they're meeting your
customers' needs. Make sure your automated messages are
serving your customers—not spamming them.
If you aren't using automated messages for all of your
forms, I strongly suggest adding them to your list of site
upgrades for 2004. Here's some advice on what makes a
good automated response:
4. Test Your Forms
In conjunction with updating your automated messages, you
should test your forms to confirm that they're still
functioning correctly—and to review how easy they are to
use. Simply submit each as if you were a visitor on your
site. Be sure to review your error messages as part of
this process. You should test your forms often and
immediately look into any sudden drops in the number of
submissions.
5. Validate Your Links
Do your part to stop link rot, while improving your site,
by making time to check your internal and external site
links—especially if you've neglected this task due to
more pressing demands. Here are a couple of basic tools
that can help:
6. Check Your Site's Search Feature
Like most of the items on this list, checking your site's
search feature should be done more than once a year. But
we know it's not always possible to review all aspects of
your site on an ongoing basis. That's why it's important
to make sure your search is functioning effectively and
that outdated content isn't showing up as part of your
annual review.
If you don't have a search feature on your site, now's a
good time to see if adding one would enhance your site's
usability.
7. Check Your File Sizes and Download Times
If a lot of updates and additions have been made to your
site, it might be time to check your site's performance.
It's not unusual for page and image files to slowly creep
up in size with each successive update. Re-optimizing
your files so your pages load faster will make for a
better user experience.
8. Review Your Stylesheets, Standards, Accessibility
and Compatibility
If you want to save some serious time for your visitors—and for yourself during site maintenance—the annual
review is the perfect time to revisit or set site
standards covering CSS, Web Standards, Accessibility and
Browser Compatibility.
Over the past two years we've seen many large and small
sites embrace these ideas and abandon support for older
browsers. However, many sites still have not made the
switch. Regardless of the category your site falls into,
now's a good time to re-evaluate your standard practices
and see if you should update them.
To help you wrestle with the issues surrounding evolving
your site to new standards, we offer these articles and
resources:
Web Standards
Cascading Stylesheets (CSS):
- CSS Work from meryerweb.com[http://www.meyerweb.com/eric/css/]
- CSS Topics from A List Apart[http://alistapart.com/topics/css/]
XHTML:
- The XHTML Way from 4 Guys from Rolla[http://www.4guysfromrolla.com/webtech/120303-1.shtml]
- XHTML Overview from WebMonkey[http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/00/50/index2a.html]
Accessibility:
Browser Stats:
9. Update Your Time References and Copyright
About Us and other background information on your site
may contain specific time references such as "for ten
years". Your site may also include a historical timeline
or list of accomplishments that should be updated at the
start of the year.
In addition, your copyright should be updated when your
content is updated. During your annual review, check to
make sure this task hasn't been overlooked. Although you
can simply use the date that the content was first
created, it's a good idea for your copyright to reflect
when content was created and when it was modified. This
is not only to protect your work, but also to avoid
having visitors think that your content is out of date.
Below are some examples of the syntax:
Examples:
- Content created in 2003:
Copyright (c) 2003 POP Interactive Inc.
- Content created in 2001 and updated in 2003:
Copyright (c) 2001, 2003 POP Interactive Inc.
- Content created in 2001 and updated in 2002 and 2003:
Copyright (c) 2001-2003 POP Interactive Inc.
Learn More About Copyrights:
10. Check Your Search Engine Visibility
Over the past year, search engines have become one of the
most important and cost-effective sources for attracting
targeted traffic and increasing brand awareness for many
sites. At the same time, many changes have taken place
in how search engines return results and display paid
(sponsored) listings. As a result, I urge you to check
your site's visibility on the top search engines by
searching for your company name, products and other
appropriate keyword phrases.
If your site isn't coming up near the top of the results
for these terms, you should look into the benefits of
marketing your site through search engine optimization
and paid placement:
10.5 Assess Your Site's Content & Features
If you want to conduct an all-encompassing annual review
of your site, I'll be the first to encourage you.
Reviewing all of your site's content and features, rather
than just the specific items listed above, is a great way
to take a big picture look at your site and identify
content and features that should be added, updated or
removed.
As part of your review, you should also identify areas of
your site that may require better procedures or tools to
streamline the maintenance process.
To get you started with the content portion of the review,
here's a recent edition of Web Insights that provides tips
and tools for dealing with your content:
In addition, here are two resources that should help you
assess the features on your site:
- Site Evaluation Form (PDF Download) from POP[http://popinteractive.com/downloads/EvaluationDocument.pdf]
- Web Design Trends from webdesignpractices.com[http://www.webdesignpractices.com/]
If you haven't had time to think about your New Year's
resolutions for 2004, here's some help: