Essentials of Website Maintenance to be considered during development

Many people believe or are made to believe that once the website is functional & live, it can take care of itself without any maintenance!

It is not a good belief to have if you have got a website with expectation for it to be a contributor in marketing & lead generation for your business.

Website maintenance is of grave importance as far as keeping a website alive is concerned because it helps to entice customers to revisit and assist search engine rankings. Mainly webmasters & content editors take care of keeping website updated & maintained. Knowing that these resources are not technical people, so it is important to consider various aspects of maintenance at the time application is being developed. This will ensure that people maintaining the website will not have to depend on web engineers or feel the need of having technical knowledge to maintain the website with ease and investing minimal possible time.

Purpose of this article is to list some aspects of maintenance, which should be considered while the website and its administrator tools are being designed & developed.

Usability & Intuitiveness

These are not just essential to offer a fulfilling user experience to the customers of the website, but are equally important to be considered for the tools/consoles being developed for the webmasters to manage, moderate & maintain the website. How easy to use are the tools being developed for administrators? Would these tools need technical knowledge to operate or anyone who is Internet savvy can use them? If we ask such questions or evaluate them while website’s webmaster panel is being developed, then it will save effort involved in maintaining the website as well as will minimize the involvement of web engineers to accomplish regular maintenance tasks.

Content Management

Content is the cornerstone of an effective website, and a website with outdated content gives no reason to potential customers or search engine crawlers to visit/crawl the website. Does the content editing tools offer ease of formatting the contents or embed media content without affecting the formatting of the page? How easy is it to use the CSS defined for the website in these content tools to ensure the design consistency is maintained? Importance of content for any website makes these questions vital to be considered while the tools for content management are being developed for the website.

Adding New Pages

Adding new pages to the website is a no-brainer, but the question is whether this activity affects your website’s overall design or not? Is your navigation flexible enough to accommodate new items without affecting the layout and aesthetics? How quick and easy is the process of adding new pages?

If your website is such that its pages are going to grow with time then it makes all the senses to ask these questions and ensure that they are addressed by tools being developed for webmasters to add new pages. But, do not skip to read further because there is a lot more that you should know as an internet entrepreneur or the webmaster.

User Generated Contents

Interaction among users is the bases of many websites functioning and being developed today. The interactions among the users generate contents for the website, it is vital for webmasters to keep moderating these contents to be sure that the policies & guidelines defined by the website for users to post contents are being meet. Does the tools in admin panel provide a quick overview of recent contents? Are the tools capable of highlighting content bits that have usage of word forbidden to be used by the website? User Generated Contents (UGC) are gaining popularity as they increase engagement, which ensures involvement of other users and get higher visibility to the website. Thus, it is absolutely indispensable that your website is equipped to easily & quickly moderate the UGC.

Manage On-Page

There are many on-page SEO factors such as META headers, tracking codes, crawler files, structured data, etc., and these needs to be tweaked & changed to back your online promotion campaigns. So, be sure that the console being developed for the Webmasters to maintain the website offer tools to manage these without the need of manually updating of scripts developed for the website.

Catalog Management

Catalog management is the backbone of any e-commerce and non e-commerce based online catalog website, as it helps to add or update product/service information like images, descriptions, prices, etc. How much time it will take to update a products/service? Can I do bulk adding & updating to services/products to my online catalogue? Are the tools developed to manage these caters to all the attributes relates to my product/services? These are some important aspects to be considered while the administration tools are being developed for your online catalogue.

Flexibility to Upgrade

This does not have to do anything with maintenance of the website, but adding new features is the integral part of the path of expansion for any website. So, is core structure of website flexible enough that new features can be added without changing the core? This is an important question and should be considered while developing a website, so that required flexibility in codes & database structures can be implanted from the day one.

All of these might not apply to each website, but some of them will. Keeping these in mind will not just help you to get comprehensive tools developed for maintenance & administration of your website, but will also allow your webmasters to save a lot of time, which can be used in off-page activities to market your website. While choosing a vendor for website development, you may as well talk about these aspects with shortlisted vendors. Evaluating their answers will assist you in the process of rating them on understanding of your needs & expectations, which will prove to be helpful in finding the right vendor for your web needs.

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