Website Maintenance
Website maintenance means doing all the things needed to make sure that your website is running smoothly and according to the plan.
Website Maintenance is composed of:
• Publishing: Keeping the contents up-to-date.
• Quality Assurance: Spotting the errors.
• Performance Monitoring: Measuring the success.
• Infrastructure Monitoring: Supervision of the hosting.
• Change Control: Managing technical and other changes in a coordinated way.
• Feedback Monitoring: Managing communications with the website visitors.
Publishing
The objective of a Publishing Process is to ensure content is created, reviewed and approved in a controlled manner. Having great information online and no one or no mechanism for looking after it, there is no sense. A good system must be built on a well resourced team and an orderly process.
Quality Assurance
The purpose of Quality Assurance is the activity that makes sure a website is operationally sound and is in conformance with the standards of the organization.The main activities of Website Quality Assurance are Data Collection and Data Analysis. Data Collection includes of checking for broken links, missing contents & browser titles and checking the file sizes of pages to ensure that they are not too large.
Infrastructure Monitoring
The aim is to create procedures for the supervision of site hosting. Website hosting refers to the service that allows a website to be stored-on and accessed from the internet.The tasks of Infrastructure Performance Monitoring are to; maintain the software used to host a site;maintain the hardware and Web security.
Performance Monitoring
It is the activity of gathering and analyzing data against which the success of a website can be evaluated. It is a measure of the traffic experienced by the site.
Change Control
It is a process of implementing technical and other updates to a website in timely and a non-disruptive manner. The responsibility of site-maintenance extends beyond issues of immediate operations. They are also concerned with the development that has the potential to affect future integrity. In this sense, a mechanism is needed by which the impact of amendments can be managed.Once a change has been made, website testing must ensue to make sure the site continues to function as intended.
Feedback Monitoring
It is a process for regulating and responding to communications from a site’s visitors in a controlled and timely manner, often overseen by a Feedback Coordinator. The role of a Feedback Coordinator is to ensure customer messages are acknowledged and responded to in a timely manner. His duties include collecting the feedback, investigate (if appropriate), make full response and archive.
Websites are of three types:
Basic Website
These sites simply contain plain text with a few supporting images, and may be, a few downloads.They are used for information.
Dynamic Website
Content is stored in a database and published in accordance to the requirements of site visitors. These may also offer basic interactive services like blogs and forums.
Transactional Website
It uses the internet for facilitating business operations and also for generating revenue. Sites of this type rely on databases and other advanced technology for collecting and processing orders.
