We’ve had a longer gap between newsletters than usual, so
we’re sending out our Annual Website Maintenance Checklist a
little early. For those of you familiar with our checklist, you
know it’s our holiday tradition to celebrate the benefits of
conducting an annual website review.
For those not familiar with our checklist, you’ll find it
includes tasks that should be performed more frequently than once
a year. But, the year-end is a great time to address these items—especially if you've neglected them due to more pressing
priorities. I suspect that many of you will relate to this based
on the overwhelmingly positive response we received to last
year’s checklist.
And, we want to thank those of you who sent feedback and
suggestions, which we've used to improve this year’s list.
1. Check Your Domain Name Record
Check your domain record once a year to ensure the contact and
address information for your organization is current. Otherwise
important notices, such as domain renewal invoices, might not get
to you. Use the below resources to review your domain record now:
- InterNIC
[http://www.internic.net/whois.html]
- VeriSign
[http://www.networksolutions.com/en_US/whois]
While you’re at it, you may want to check the status of domains
you’ve had your eye on to see if they’ve become available.
2. Review Your Website Email Addresses
If you don’t have a list of all the email addresses that appear
on your site, you should make one during your annual review.
Then confirm that they’re all still active and going to the
correct people.
3. Update Your Confirmation and Automated Messages
Automated responses can greatly enhance your customers’ experience
with your company and site, but only if they contain accurate and
timely information. So, if it’s been a while since you updated
the automated confirmations and messages sent from your forms,
it's time to review them.
If you still aren't using automated messages for all of the forms
on your site, I strongly suggest adding this to your list of site
enhancements for 2005.
Here's some advice on how to get more out of your autoresponder
messages:
If you’re interested in ways to get more out of all the emails
that your company sends out, here’s another great read:
4. Test Your Forms & Check Your Error Messages
Chances are the software on your website server is frequently
upgraded or patched. These updates can impact the functionality
of your forms, so it’s a good idea to test them at least once a
year. And, if you ever see a sudden drop in activity from your
forms, you should check them immediately.
Also, be sure to review your error messages during this process to
make sure they’re friendly and helpful.
To help you improve your forms, here’s a series of articles that
we’ve pointed out in the past:
5. Check Your Password Protected Areas
While you’re testing your forms, you should also test any login
areas on your site to make sure they’re still properly protected.
In addition, you may want to review your password-protected areas
to see if now may be the appropriate time to change passwords.
6. Check Your Site's Search Feature
Do you know if old content or old pages that you thought had been
removed from your server are showing up in your site’s search
results? Have all of the most recent updates to your site been
indexed by your search application? We suggest checking your site
search feature to make sure it’s functioning effectively and that
it includes the right content as part of your annual review—and on a regular basis.
7. Check Your File Sizes and Download Times
It’s not unusual to find that your page file sizes have increased
as updates have been made to your site over time. If it’s been a
while since you’ve checked how well optimized your code and
graphics are, add this task to your annual review.
8. Review Your Stylesheets, Standards, Accessibility
and Compatibility
If you haven’t already embraced cascading stylesheets (CSS), web
standards and accessibility, the annual review of your site is
the perfect time to revisit the topic. Especially if you’re
considering a redesign or plan to make extensive changes to your
site in the near future.
Taking advantage of stylesheets and web standards can greatly
enhance the performance of your site and make it more cost
effective to maintain. In addition, implementing your site using
web standards can make it much more accessible to those with
special browsing needs, such as relying on a screen reader.
It’s just as important to re-evaluate the browser compatibility
requirements of your site on an annual basis. Over the last
year new versions of Safari and Firefox were released, and the
use of older versions of IE and Netscape continued to decline.
Here are a few of our favorite resources to help you determine
the best approach to standards compliance and browser
compatibility, and the appropriate requirements for your site
and visitors:
What Are Web Standards and Why Should I Use Them?
[http://www.webstandards.org/learn/faq/]
Cascading Stylesheets (CSS):
XHTML:
Accessibility:
Browser Stats:
9. Validate Your Links
Don’t let broken links make your site look like it’s poorly
maintained or out of date. Make a point to check your internal
and external links as part of your annual review, even if you
already validate your links on a regular basis. Here are a
couple of basic tools that can help:
10. Update Your Time References and Copyright Notice
If your site includes timeframe references (e.g. “for five years”),
historical timelines or lists of accomplishments, they should be
updated during your annual review.
You should also check your copyright dates to ensure they were
updated when your content was last updated. If you’re not sure
how your copyright should appear, here are some guidelines: You
can simply use the date that the content was first created, but
it's a good idea for your copyright to reflect when content was
created and when it was modified. This helps to protect your
work and avoid having visitors think that your content is
outdated. Below are some examples of the syntax:
Examples:
- Content created in 2004:
Copyright (c) 2004 POP Interactive Inc.
- Content created in 2002 and updated in 2004:
Copyright (c) 2002, 2004 POP Interactive Inc.
- Content created in 2002 and updated in 2003 and 2004:
Copyright (c) 2002-2004 POP Interactive Inc.
Learn more about copyrights as well as how to register your work:
11. Review Your Privacy Policy
It’s important to review your Privacy Policy with the appropriate
members of your organization, to determine if it needs to be
updated and ensure that it’s being adhered to, especially if
you’ve been putting this task off all year.
Also, make sure your Privacy Policy is readily accessible from the
pages on your site that ask your visitors for their email address
or other personal information.
12. Check Your Search Engine Visibility
You might say 2004 was a banner year for search engines as more
companies recognized the value of search engine marketing and
optimization. It also marked another year of major changes in
how search engines return results and offer paid listings.
These changes have resulted in more search engine visibility for
those that have taken advantage of them and less for those that
haven’t.
Time and time again we see how improving the visibility of a site
on the search engines is one of the most cost-effective ways to
attract targeted traffic. So, if you don’t have a search engine
marketing strategy in place, exploring the benefits of doing so
should definitely be part of your annual review.
To see how your site is performing for any given term, try the
following tool:
For an overview of Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Search Engine
Optimization (SEO) and Paid Search Placement along with some tips,
read the following article:
Start Your New Year’s Website Resolutions List
Since we know you're planning on completing this checklist by the
end of the year, we also have a suggestion for the start of the
New Year: Conduct an all-encompassing review of your site.
The start of the year is a great time to take a big-picture look
at your site; identify content and features that need to be added,
updated or removed; and determine if you need new procedures or
tools to improve the maintenance process.
To help get you started, here’s our Site Evaluation Form:
When you're done with our checklist, here are some other lists
to check out. Hopefully they'll bring you some holiday cheer: