Maintenance

While maintenance happens after the website is launched, it is important to consider how you want to maintain the website so that appropriate features can be built into the site from the beginning.

What type of content maintenance program?

There are a number of levels of sophistication and options for content maintenance of a website:

• outsourced: requests for change and the new contents are emailed to a web developer who makes the changes
• in-house semi-automated: the organisation makes the changes itself by using an off-the-shelf editing program, e.g. Dreamweaver
• in-house automated: the organisation makes the changes itself by using software that allows non-technical staff to manage site content. This is known as a content management system (CMS).

Technical maintenance

Technical maintenance of a website refers to any changes to the site that require alterations to its programming code – e.g. for the site's graphics and navigation, metadata, database, e-commerce solution. Technical maintenance also refers to adjustments that improve the website's speed and reliability, and monitor usage of the site.

Maintaining the technical aspects of the website generally requires specialist knowledge and skills in website programming, so you will need to establish which items on the list you can manage yourself and which you would want to have managed by your web developer or another supplier. Any maintenance arrangement with a web developer will require a separate contract and agreement as to service levels required (service level agreement).

A technical maintenance checklist

While this is technical business that your developer will carry out, you should have a handle on the process.

With the developer, determine a schedule for technical maintenance that indicates what is to be done weekly and monthly and what tasks are undertaken only when the need arises. The schedule should include all maintenance items and indicate for each what associated tasks are to be performed daily, weekly etc.

Note that we are discussing maintenance only, not large-scale changes which would need to be fully planned and scoped.

A technical maintenance list might include some or all of:

• the speed of the site – how fast it is to download
• hotlinks to other sites – e.g. validity of the hotlinks
• the reliability of the web server – includes dealing with error reports from the web server
• the speed and reliability of information derived from the database
• email lists – includes removing faulty email addresses
• user sessions, hits and traffic through the site
• the exporting of data collected from online forms to the appropriate personnel
• the integrity and performance of the e-commerce system, if applicable
• interactive elements of the site – e.g. play-back feature for audio/video
• the use of metadata in the website.