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Importance of Website Maintenance. (Does your website pass the freshness test?)

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Why do companies need their website to be maintained, when they can ask one of their employees to do a quick job of it? Asking one of your employees to make quick changes to your website is just a money saving tactic. Website maintenance is an important process of keeping your site up to date either daily or at regular periods. It is crucial that a website be maintained by professionals, instead of any in-house inexperienced employee. Reason is over a period of time, if not done by a professional it could result in broken links, files are exposed or deleted, the navigation structure is a mess along and the appearance of the design.

Proper and professional website maintenance guarantees that the site will function smoothly. Since minute details like, links, navigation, details to correcting text, checking for missing images etc are checked. A regularly updated website with fresh content is what search engines prefer. If regularly updated with proper content, links and keywords, the site climbs up the charts of any search engine e.g. Google. On the contrary if a website has not been updated for a period of time, then the rankings just plunge. It is important for every website to be featured in the top ten rankings of a search engine, and only regular maintenance will help achieve that. Regular website maintenance not only helps in the rankings but also helps get good recognition for a business along with its services and products. The algorithms that search engines like Google use are anyone’s guess. Study of their patent data revels that, Google likes it “fresh”. According to Google a document is in a deemed state if “no longer updated, diminished in importance, or superceded by another document”.

This is a clear indication that the website needs to pass though every search engines “freshness test”. And to be fresh enough, a website needs to be maintained and updated frequently. If not, a website stands to loose its value in business as well as in the internet community. Proper website maintenance will help constantly promote a website though renewal of dead links that does not capture the visitor’s interest, mainly since external links are abandoned, modified or moved to a new location. People are constantly looking for change, interesting news, topics and content that are relevant to the current times. If the content is stale and uninteresting, visitors will not be impulsed to spend time on that site. Why return to a website, when the content is already known? Website maintenance makes sure that the content is refreshed, and tangy enough to capture its core audience. This increases the traffic to the website, which again helps improve its ranking on search engines. Webmasters, who are responsible to maintain sites, also develop newsletters, announcing the arrival of a new product or events that are revolutionary to their business. This ensures that there is constant communication with customers, and also lets a business know the pulse of the market.

Maintaining a website will ensure that the site is up-to-date, links are intact, there are no spelling mistakes in content, increase and widen the portfolio of a business and that content is “fresh” all the time.

Does your website pass the freshness test?

Please contact Whole Integration for all of your website design and maintenance needs.

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Doug’s Web Design LLC / Whole Integration, a Veteran Owned and Operated Business.

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Website Maintenance Tools – Advantages of using these tools

builderboy It is essential to maintain an existing website to make sure that the links are functioning right or the content is error free. The right tools definitely make maintenance of website much easier rather than manually checking for every details and correction to error. With the proper website maintenance tools one can include pictures or text, update content on the website and fix rot links. A website owner has several options that are available to him that will help him with this job.

With the proper tools the webmaster or the website designer who is a professional can make sure as well as understand how to maintain a profitable website. Tools definitely help lower the cost of maintaining a website and are an efficient way to make required changes to the website. These tools also make the website compatible to be viewed on PDA’s and different technological devices that are hand held and are much popular in these times.

Tools such as the Link Check Tool are popularly used by webmaster’s that help them check if the link on the website is not a rot link. Each link on the website is checked and a detailed report of all of them can be compiled. It also gives regular warnings about directory redirects and HTTP redirects. If someone wants to find if the webpage has any bad tags, then tools such as the HTML check and repair tool is used which also checks if there is any syntax error in the code. It creates a report of all the mistakes in the code and corrects them automatically, at the same time checking the appearance of the page with that of the uncorrected version.

It is also possible to check if the website is compatible with different browsers. Different browsers respond differently to HTML tags, the tool makes sure that errors are taken care of since it automatically repairs them and makes it viewable in all browsers. Any website increases in size if there are too many applications or heavy pictures that are included in it. Videos also increase the size of the pages. The Load Time Check Tool checks the time your website takes to download on a browser, along with review on the size of objects that are included. It also checks to see if there is any bad HTML coding that could be the result of the page not loading. Spell check tool as the name suggests, help in checking for any spelling mistakes that the content of the webpage could have. Another useful tool is the Image Optimization tool that helps to compress image files belonging to different extensions. It helps in reducing the size of the image at the same time maintains its quality. It also allows us to compare the images, the final one and the earlier heavy image. Just so that you know there is no change in the quality of the image.

There are several software tools that are available to optimise a website and maintain it efficiently. It definitely reduces the cost, time and effort that a webmaster needs to put in while he maintains the website.

Please contact Whole Integration for all of your website design and maintenance needs.

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Doug’s Web Design LLC / Whole Integration, a Veteran Owned and Operated Business.

Content by Whole Integration

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Web security the Whole Integration Way.

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Some people think that you can create a website, upload it to a hosting server and forget about it. Nothing is more distant to the reality. Everyday new bugs are discovered and exploited, some may be related to the language that was used to create your webpage, (php, asp, jsp etc) others may be related to the software that displays your page (apache, nginx, iis etc), others may be related with third party software (how many sites require the adobe flash plug-in to work properly?) and others may be related to the Operating System that your host server is using. Whatever is the bug and wherever it comes from you are always at risk.

Then doesn’t everyone get hacked and have their sites shut down? The main reason is statistics, there are millions of websites in the world, the chance that someone with enough knowledge and free time to attack your web is like the odds of winning the lottery (but someone has to win the lottery right?). Another reason is that hacking is not a trivial task, don’t trust the movies, there are no fashion GUIs and handsome teenagers hacking a website in 5 minutes. To hack a website normally requires a lot of hours and a considerable effort that most hackers are not going to spent.

How to be safe? Here are a few tips that will help you:

1) Always have a remote backup of your files, if something goes wrong you will not lose your valuable info in an instance.

2) If you use a third party software, for example Joomla, drupal, osCommerce, Magento, etc check their websites for security updates and new versions, think about it: suppose you are using Joomla 1.0 as it was originally released and you never updated it. If a hacker finds your website, he only has to check the bugs that were found on Joomla 1.0 and patched in the next release. If you failed to update Joomla you are still vulnerable to the reported bugs (and many are very well explained!)

3) Always use passwords longer than six characters, with some capital letters, numbers and symbols. Utilize a vey custom password that fails to meet any dictionary standard word.

4) When hiring a hosting provider don’t only see the price and the promised bandwidth and hard drive space. Ask them what versions of the software they use, how often they check for updates, and if they have an IDS (intrusion detection system). This will help you to make a better decision for you and your company.

I followed all of this advice but got hacked anyway, what should I do?

Don’t panic, the banks also take a lot of precautions and they get their sites hacked from time to time. Take a deep breath and contact your hosting provider or sysadmin. Don’t touch anything, even the most paranoid hacker leaves some traces, (sometimes the traces are only visible with root access) so if you start changing things you will help him to hide his actions. Instead compare the files (after the hacking) with the files of your last backup. The modification date of a file will reveal what files were changed in the last days, and if you compare the size in KB of the current files against their backups, you will find out the files with more or less code. Also inspect the server logs; they can reveal valuable information about how the hacker got access.

After you have an idea of how the hacker got in, (or even if you did not find it out) you should create a “honeynet”, whats that? Short answer: a trap. Once you restore the website, the hacker will be tempted to hack it again, so you should start monitoring your website in partnership with your sysadmin and/or hosting provider, and leave it untouched for some time, this way any action can be associated with the hacker and will reveal his techniques.

Jorge

Whole Integration

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Doug’s Web Design LLC / Whole Integration, a Veteran Owned and Operated Business.

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Keep the Websites Fresh with Website Maintenance

tools “The aim of a true achievement must lie, not in futile efforts towards the complete accommodation of man to circumstances in which he chances to find himself, but in the maintenance of a kind of candid discontent, in the face of the very highest achievements” ~ Walter Horatio Pater.

As Walter puts it, maintenance is actually the fuel that keeps us going. Be it the circumstances we deal with in our life, or the challenges we experience on the web, the story is similar. All we need is to maintain and keep the websites fresh with website maintenance and we will have fewer reasons to complain.

In today’s time, the technology is continually advancing. A regular visitor to a website can easily be lured into another, merely because of the monotonous content, the look, and the options that remain un-upgraded. We keenly observe these days every web portal is innovating by introducing something new each day that its immediate competitor doesn’t offer. We all know how the chat was introduced in several e-mail portals after google took the lead. So, let’s understand how we can stay in lead in keeping the websites fresh.. Here are some tips:

* Keep a close tab on the deadline and keep your website up to date. Make the changes visible for your visitor by including new RSS feeds, new links, offers, backgrounds, etc.

* Check to eliminate all the reasons for the visitor getting to read this statement, “The page you are looking for is currently unavailable. The Web site might be experiencing technical difficulties, or you may ^need to adjust your browser settings.” Let’s admit it, we can’t afford this happening. It’s important that we ensure that all the links work, by deleting/correcting any that don’t

* Ensure all the images are displayed properly. Use Alt Tags behind your images, in case the picture doesn’t load correctly. The Alt tag will display and the user still knows what the picture is about.

* Are you online? Most of the web monitoring companies can stay watchful on the downtime being experienced each week. Please consider to change your web host if they cannot ensure the site is operational 24 hrs a day.

* Wanna stay safe? Always have a back up database of your website’s content. You could also copy and paste the content, with links, into a document and store that. If something goes wrong, you can rebuild your site fairly quickly.

There are many things that all webmasters must do on a regular basis to ensure that their web sites remain functionally fresh. Let’s put together a check list of introspective questions that can might help in letting your creative juices flow out.

1) Have you promoted your website constantly?

2) What attempts have you taken to get people to your site?

3) Have you checked is there is a “link rot” happening somewhere?

4) Have you kept changing the content constantly to keep your visitors glued?

5) Are you checking the page counts to know if your website is being constantly reviewed?

With all of these maintenance options and suggestions above, you will have all of the knowledge and information needed to make the right decision about your website and your maintenance. Please feel free to contact Whole Integration or Doug’s Web Design LLC about all of your website design maintenance needs.

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Doug’s Web Design LLC / Whole Integration, a Veteran Owned and Operated Business.

Content by Whole Integration

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