Classifying Websites for Website Maintenance

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web maintenance, web maintenance Sydney, web monitoring

 

Websites differ in a lot of ways and for the website maintenance team, classifying websites properly will help them maintain it efficiently.  There are three parameters to consider when classifying websites and these are:

Size – Website size represents the total man-hours needed to maintain the site.

Complexity – A website’s complexity is based on how the site is developed and the technologies and plug-ins that was used to create it.

Levels of Activity – The activity is measured by the amount traffic the site receives.

In order to determine whether you need a team of website maintenance specialists, you need to know how your website’s classification. And to do that we need to explain the parameters even further. But first we have to be well acquainted with the fields of work.

The Website Management Team includes:

v  Team Leader

• Publishing Specialist of Editor and the Quality Assurance Specialist
  • Feedback Monitoring Specialists and the Website Performance Specialist
    • Infrastructure Monitoring Specialist and the Change Control Specialists

The number of people for each function mentioned depends on the Scale of the website.  A small scale website may only be manned by two people doing several tasks at once.

Website Size

As mentioned, the size of the website depends on the total hours needed to maintain the website’s over-all health.

v  Small Website – Hours spent to create content is about 1,500 to 4,000 hours per year or 125 to 350 hours per month.  There should be one or two people tasked to handle content publishing and quality assurance.

v  Medium Website – 4,000 to 10,000 hours a year or 350 to 850 hours a month would be dedicated to content and a minimum of 2 to 3 people working on quality assurance and publishing.

v  Large website – is any website that spends more than 10,000 hours a year on content and more than 3 people working on publishing and quality assurance.

 

Website Complexity

v  Basic Website

If it’s a simple informative brochure type website with only a few texts and images then it’s your basic website, some have as little as two pages.  Over all website maintenance for this site is easy.

v  Dynamic Website

A dynamic website has a stored content database and what appears on the screen is based on the needs and specification of the visitor or user.

v  Transactional Website

This type is a business or e-commerce site and it requires a lot of website maintenance and monitoring on a daily basis.

Website Activity

This may be classified as Quiet with zero to 100,000 page impressions a month, Intermediate if the page impressions averages somewhere between 100,000 to a million a month and Busy if it gains a constant one million a month and over.

A good website maintenance service will be able to classify your website within these parameters and propose an efficient website maintenance team.

How Do You Know If Your Site Has Been Hacked?

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web monitoring, website hacking

All websites are susceptible to malware and hackers that wish to promote their sites.  The best way to prevent ever getting hacked is to be diligent.  So how do you know if your site is hacked?  There are indications but unfortunately, in some cases, knowing that you’ve been hacked doesn’t really help and the only other choice is to start from scratch.  You’re site has been hacked if…

• Your password is not working anymore.  This is the most obvious indication that your site has been hacked.
• You have an extra page on your site, usually a page endorsing another site or a product they are trying to sell online.
• Your site has been flagged by search engines, web browsers and anti-virus softwares as malware.  Usually, malicious codes are inserted in the site and visible only if the source code is viewed.
• Google says you’ve been hacked when you run the Google Safe Browsing Tool. Some hackers make subtle changes on your site just for fun which may not be harmful but if you are running an online store that has constant traffic, this may cause problems for your customers.  Run a diagnostics test to see if you’ve been or being hacked.
• The pages load significantly slower than usual and traffic has been unusual as well.
• You receive hordes of spam emails.
• There are changes in homepage size or even the page title.

Due diligence means you have a clear idea of what to look for, find it in time and make necessary changes.  However, time is usually a commodity that eludes most people nowadays, indeed there are so many things to do but with little time to do it.  And maintaining a website, monitoring for hackers, keeping track of website uptime and running a business is usually a job for more than one person.  Fortunately, site monitoring is a service being offered online for a minimal fee.  Site-monitor.co for instance gives you a premium service that monitors your site at intervals of 5 minutes. They alert you instantly if there are any changes, suspicious or otherwise.

Web monitoring services such as being offered by site-monitor.com lets you focus on your other priorities while they do the nitty-gritty monitoring work and keep you informed if there are changes worth noting. To know more about their services, visit the site-monitor.com website

Online Marketing Strategies – The Importance of Web Maintenance

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web maintenance, web maintenance Sydney

The internet has given businesses a newer and better marketing platform. Unfortunately, it is an entirely different ballgame from the conventional marketing strategies that established companies are used to.  Old school businesses needed to re-learn their marketing plan and get back to the drawing board.

Marketing is an integral part of doing business and companies spend as much as 10 to 16 percent of their annual budget on it.  And since the population of online shoppers has significantly increased, thanks to the growing number of 3G devices, much of that budget goes to developing and optimizing websites, and on website maintenance.  It is not enough in this fast paced world to have a great looking website and to leave it at that.  In fact, all the effort put into building the website is ineffective if web maintenance is not given as much priority.  Let’s put it this way, what is the use of developing a product that may be the best there is, if no one knows that it exists, or more specifically for example yours is the  best Italian restaurant if you do not tell people that it is the best and how to get there.

Web maintenance is all about getting the website the right exposure it needs – the kind of exposure that matters which includes having it dominate the search engine result page, updating content relevance, continually building quality inbound links and constantly evaluating keyword competitiveness and marketing strategies.  Websites, in order to be effective need to be able adapt quickly to the constantly changing search engine algorithms, market trends, social media fads and web related technology.

The internet, along with the technology that drives it is fast paced and it is not easy keeping track of what is happening.  One day, you are the talk of the town and the next day, you’re just second best.  And that’s the kind of change that can really hurt sales. This is why web maintenance is an important on-going activity for any company whose sales are dependent on their website.

Most small businesses run on a tight budget and try to skip this very important aspect of any online business -what makes them small however, may just be because they do. It is a time consuming endeavor that is better outsourced so business owners can focus on what they do best – running and managing the business.