Maintaining your web content and technology

A successful website should be implemented effectively and maintained professionally.

Maintaining your website is absolutely crucial. Although the technology may be outsourced to an internet service provider (ISP), it is the responsibility of the website owner to ensure that the content of the site is accurate and updated regularly. This will promote a positive online image of the business – helping you to attract new customers and also retain existing customers.

This guide provides an outline of the key phases in implementing a website, including the requirement for integration with back-office systems, together with advice on the ongoing maintenance tasks that need to be undertaken.

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Implementing your website

Implementation means putting your website into operation. There are several phases that you will go through during the implementation process.

Implementing the website

When you implement your website, you will need to train your staff. You should encourage staff involvement and feedback, as staff buy-in can make or break a technology project.

You should also consider setting up a cross-departmental taskforce to manage the implementation process. It will help with staff buy-in and help ensure the website is compatible with other business systems – for example your accounts package or customer database. See the page in this guide on integrating your back office systems.

System testing

Before putting the website live, you need to test it sufficiently. Poor testing or no testing is extremely risky. Errors that appear later can be expensive to correct – and may damage your business’ reputation.

The main purpose of testing is to assess your website’s usability, accessibility and functionality. Testing should also look at the response times experienced by users and verify how the site functions under peak loads. It is also useful to see how easily users can access and navigate through the site across different platforms.

Planning the rollout

Decide whether you will have a soft launch to existing customers, or simply make it available on the internet to as wide an audience as possible.

Other issues to consider include:

• How you will market the site – both offline and online.
• Who will maintain the site – will it be handled in-house or will you outsource the maintenance?
• Will your staff need any additional training to maintain the site?
• Who will manage customer feedback and any online orders?

Launching the website

At the launch of the site you need to encourage existing customers to use it. Ensure that you promote the web address in your marketing material and that the website can be easily found on search engines. Search marketing techniques like search engine optimisation and pay per click advertising can help you reach potential customers. See our guides on search engine optimisation and pay per click advertising.

For more information on promoting your website see our guide on how to generate business from your e-marketing plan.

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Integrating your back-office systems

Linking your back-office and online systems together improves efficiency and could ultimately lead to greater customer satisfaction.

What are back-office systems?

Back-office systems run all your business administration processes. They are commonly an automated set of processes run by a piece of software on your computer. A back-office system, using an accounting package or database, will:

• record all sales transactions
• record all purchases
• update inventory records accordingly
• generate all appropriate paperwork – ie invoices and receipts

Many back-office systems can also carry shipping information and can produce reports that are invaluable in monitoring business performance and predicting future trends.

What is integration?

In practical terms integration means connecting your online e-commerce system with your back-office accounts and database systems, so that whenever a customer places an order online, your web store and back office deal with the sale as one. The online system accepts the order and then relays all this information back to the customer, while the back office records the transaction, adjusts inventory levels, generates an invoice and fulfils the order. See our guide on customer relationship management.

Benefits of integration

Benefits of integration include:

• greatly improved customer service
• faster response times
• enhanced capacity – greater automation allows you to deal with much larger volumes of business
• reduced costs in the medium and long term
• improved accuracy – with web store and back-office accessing the same data the chances of errors are greatly reduced
• better use of staff time

Integration solutions

The three main options for achieving integration are:

• purchasing off-the-shelf software that includes built-in back-office functionality
• employing a specialist software firm to create an interface between your systems
• using an application or cloud computing service provider

When looking for software solutions, make sure they support open standards such as XML (Extensible Mark-up Language).

Make sure your solution has the flexibility to deal with moving into new markets by having the ability to price in other currencies, for instance.

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Reviewing your website for errors

It is important to keep your website up to date and error free. Sites lose credibility if their content is not updated or links do not work.

There are a number of actions you should undertake regularly as part of your website maintenance to ensure that the image of your business does not suffer because of the poor performance or user perception of your site.

Checking links

You should regularly check the links on your website to ensure that they all work and that the content you are linking to is still relevant. If there are significant numbers of links, consider checking a portion of them per week as a rotating maintenance operation.

Ensure that any time-sensitive links are still current. It is annoying for your users to click on a link and find that the topic is no longer there or the special offer has expired.

Don’t forget to check links to your own pages to ensure that every page is fully functional and that the internal content it is linking to remains relevant and up to date.

Checking advertising or sponsorship banners

If your website carries advertising or other types of sponsorship banner, eg affiliate marketing, you need to check that the merchant’s link is still active. A common problem facing many website owners is a discontinued sponsor link, with your user clicking through and failing to reach the merchant’s home page or campaign landing page – this can reflect badly on your website. Also ensure that the adverts that appear on your site are relevant to your website’s audience.

Check your site meets advertising rules

Since 1 March 2011, the Committee of Advertising Practice (CAP) Code’s remit has been extended to include any online advertisement or statement that’s intended to sell products or services. This includes marketing material on your own website, as well as non-paid-for space under your control – eg pages on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter.

You can find out more in the page on online and email advertisements, promotions and marketing in our guide on how to comply with advertising standards. 

Spelling and typos

Web designers will commonly use a syntax-checking program to catch grammatical errors and typos before the site is fully operational. However, you should also carry out such checks regularly once the site is live and as content is added.

Maintenance tools

There are a number of free and paid-for tools available online that you can use to assist in carrying out the various checks on your website. These tools can identify broken links, missing images, spelling mistakes and other problems that can damage user confidence and adversely affect your search engine ranking.

Use an online link checker on the W3C website- Opens in a new window.

Check that your website conforms to W3C web standards on the W3C Markup Validation Service website- Opens in a new window.

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Updating your website content

You should always make sure that your website is updated frequently. If you don’t update your site and keep it looking fresh, users may not revisit it and you will lose the opportunity to promote new products or services.

Approach to updating

Keep the content as up to date as possible. If you have a news or announcements section, it is vital that these remain current. If you have old news stories that you feel could be of interest to users, then you could place them in a searchable archive.

User-generated or Web 2.0 content is one way of ensuring that your content remains both engaging and up to date. For more information, see our guide on Web 2.0: a guide for business.

Content management

If your website has a lot of dynamic content that changes frequently, you could consider using a content management system.

Content management software has been developed to assist in the collection, assembly and management of content on a website, an intranet or an extranet. See our guide on content management systems.

Update notification

Remember to change the notice on your website stating when the site was last updated and consider sending out an email alert to let subscribers know that updated content is available.

You can also use Web 2.0 tools to update customers about changes to your content. See our guide on web 2.0: a guide for business.

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Website monitoring

It is important to monitor how your website performs and the way visitors use it.

Performance monitoring tools

Many websites are affected by slow performance, major outages, content errors, transaction failures and slow loading pages.

To address these problems consider using website performance-monitoring tools. These measure the response times of specific transactions or pinpoint the location of bottlenecks that slow down the website, such as the application server, a specific database, or a network router.

Some tools also identify the causes for slow page loading speeds, such as loading too many banners, too many high-resolution graphics files, or disk space problems.

Many of the main search engines – such as Google, Yahoo and MSN – provide tips, advice and tools to help you improve the performance of your website. Access the Google Webmaster tools on the Google website (registration required)- Opens in a new window.

Monitoring website traffic

One of the more important aspects of website maintenance is tracking how users find your website and what they do once they get there.

As part of monitoring the website traffic you need to know how many visitors click on your pages, how many pages they visit and which pages they spend most time on. All of this information is necessary to identify a need to upgrade the site or customise features to address visitor needs.

The information that can be gathered as part of your traffic-monitoring includes:

• the date and time that each visitor accessed your site
• the individual IP (internet protocol) address of each visitor’s computer
• how they have arrived at your site, for example if they were referred to it by a search engine
• the number of pages that every visitor viewed, shown by the time they accessed each page and the length of time spent viewing each page
• the type of browser and operating system used by each visitor

This information also forms valuable feedback on your marketing activities. It can help indicate the success or otherwise of a marketing campaign as well as showing where specific promotional activities should be focused.

Your internet service provider (ISP) should provide you with a range of traffic-monitoring options as part of the service they offer. Alternatively, there are a number of free services – such as Google Analytics and Yahoo! Web Analytics – that can help you identify where visitors to your site come from and how they use your site. Find out about Google Analytics on the Google website- Opens in a new window.

Read about Yahoo! Web Analytics on the Yahoo! website- Opens in a new window.

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Website maintenance options

Although you have several options for how website maintenance is undertaken, there are four main approaches.

Do it yourself

You can carry out the maintenance in-house using a variety of tools – these include WYSIWYG (‘what you see is what you get’) editors, graphics software and various online validation services, eg the W3C’s markup validation checker.

However, updating a site’s content can be time consuming and require both technical and design expertise. If you don’t have a dedicated webmaster, then you must ensure that the person given responsibility has sufficient time and also the necessary skill set.

Ad-hoc basis

You can pay your internet service provider (ISP) on an ‘as required’ basis to carry out maintenance and updating activities. This is a viable option if the changes are relatively infrequent. However, as the volume of content on your site grows it will become less cost effective.

Maintenance agreement

The most common approach is to set up a maintenance agreement with your ISP or with a website developer or digital agency. This will take account of the need for regular and frequent updates to the content and ongoing checking and monitoring activities. The fee will usually be fixed on a monthly or quarterly basis.

User tools

The final option is provided by an increasing number of suppliers who offer easy-to-use tools, such as simple content management software, that enable end users to update parts of the website themselves. Such tools can be used on their own or as part of a general maintenance contract.

Maintenance budgets

Whichever option you decide to adopt, ensure that you have fully budgeted for it – there will be a cost even for routine updates to your site.

You also need to take account of more significant upgrading or redesigning of the site, which is time consuming and expensive. Assign a budget for more radical changes to the site in addition to the routine maintenance.

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Evaluating progress

An essential part of the overall website maintenance activity is to periodically review the performance of the website, in order to establish whether it is achieving the hoped-for benefits, and help identify areas for potential enhancement.

Set targets

At the outset of any e-commerce or website development project you need to set specific targets in terms of your expectations of the new system. For example, you may decide to:

• set goals for your e-commerce website – eg to bring in new business or cut the cost of each sale
• agree SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time-based) objectives for what you want to achieve – eg a percentage increase in sales or new customers

Evaluate

As part of the evaluation process you should:

• monitor and review the impact on your business against your initial set of targets and objectives
• continue to benchmark your site against those of your competitors and market leaders in order to assess any developments they have made and decide whether these are appropriate for your own site
• get feedback from staff, customers and suppliers on any changes you have made in order to ascertain how well they have been received
• review the success, or otherwise, of any marketing activities you have undertaken

Ideally you should look to evaluate the impact after six months and again after one year. Have you achieved your overall objectives? Document the lessons you have learned and look at how you could improve things further.

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