Our Monmouth Blog

When was the last time you did basic website maintenance to your website? Basic website maintenance should be on your calendar to complete quarterly. There are four basic tests that eliminate the majority of client experience issues and bugs that sneak they way into your site over time. I recommend executing a complete visual review, browser test, link check, and html validation.

A complete visual review will catch several types of issues. I recommend that your complete this test using Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE). For most websites IE is the predominately used browser so it is important to start there. Every page should be reviewed for layout, imagery, and typography.

Once you have completed the visual review then you should test your website in other browsers. Browsers such as Firefox, Safari, and Opera have gained in popularity and your site should function correctly in all of them. It is important that you are aware of how your site functions and looks in other browsers.

There is a quick and easy tool that you can use to check links automatically on your website. Its a great tool that saves a lot of manual work. W3C link checker is simple to use and extremely effective. All you have to do is enter the URL of you site and watch it work. When the results are returned you have a complete report of what needs attention.

The last part of your manual website maintenance should be a markup validation review from W3C. Any issues should be addressed. Valid code will ensure your site is healthy as well as help your search engine results by certifying that your website can be properly crawled.

If you follow this routine regularly you will have confidence that users of your site have the experience you expect. Web errors will lead to loss of subscription and user dissatisfaction. Following these steps regularly will ensure that your site functions like a well oiled machine.

Tell us your web maintenance tips.

Regards,

Howard

Trackback URI | Comments RSS