Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Having provided website services to large and small companies for over 14 years, I know that some
aspects of updating and maintaining your website often get put off due to more pressing priorities. So,
if it’s been awhile since you performed a review of the more basic aspects of your website, it’s time to
do so now.
To help, here’s the latest update of our "Annual Website Maintenance Checklist", which has become
popular with managers of websites of all sizes. Keep in mind, a number of the items listed below
should be performed more often than once a year—but I will leave the appropriate frequency up to you.
Just be sure to perform these tasks at least once a year.
▪ InterNIC [www.internic.net/whois.html]
▪ Network Solutions [www.networksolutions.com/whois]
While you’re at it, you might want to refer to these articles to make sure you’re getting the most
out of your automated emails:
Also, to help your emails get through to your visitors, make sure your website includes text asking
them to whitelist your email address or, better yet, your entire domain (i.e. domainname.com).
It’s also important to review the error messages on your site periodically to make sure they’re
friendly and helpful.
If you’re interested in conducting a more comprehensive review of your forms, you should add
looking into how you can improve them to your to do list—especially if you're not getting the
desired results from them. These articles provide valuable information about how to do so:
Taking full advantage of web standards and stylesheets can greatly enhance the performance of
your website and make it more cost effective to maintain. And, implementing your site using web
standards can make it more accessible to those with special browsing needs, such as relying on
screen readers. It will also enhance your compatibility with mini-browsers (iPhone, PDA and
smartphone browsers).
It’s also important to re-evaluate the browser compatibility requirements of your website on a
periodic basis. Over the last year new versions of Firefox (Version 3) and Safari (Version 3) were
released. In addition, Google released its Chrome browser and Microsoft IE 8 Release Candidate is
available, with the final version to be released soon.
Here are a few of my firm’s website designers and developers favorite resources to help you
determine the best approach to standards compliance, CSS, browser compatibility as well as the
appropriate requirements for your website and visitors:
Keep in mind that your copyright can simply reflect the date that the content was first created, but
it's better to reflect when content was created and when it was modified. This will help protect
your work and avoid having visitors think that your content is outdated. Examples of Copyright
Syntax:
To see how your site is performing for any given term, try the following tool:
For basic and in-depth information about Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and Search Engine
Optimization (SEO), I suggest this site:
Next Steps?
If it has been over a year since you closely evaluated the content on your site, you should set aside
time—as part of your maintenance review or as a separate project—to take a big-picture look at your
website. As part of this process, you should not only include making sure your content is up-to-date but
that it reflects the current image and goals of your organization. After all, you do know what they say
about content.
To help get you started, you can download our Site Evaluation Form: