Maintaining Your System in HTML Creating Commercial Websites

System maintenance is a rather broad subject. A simple system may require little maintenance, whereas maintenance on a large, multiple-author system can be a full-time job.

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Whether it takes you 5 minutes per week or 50 hours, there are steps you can take to help facilitate effective system maintenance and time management.

Your primary goal will obviously be to keep the site’s links current and make sure that no files have become corrupt. While there are specific software programs that can help with this (InContext WebAnalyzer, for instance), you can also simply go through the system on a weekly basis to make sure everything’s running and loading correctly.

The fact that “nothing should go wrong” is little help when something does go wrong. So, even if you’re contracting out everything—including the HTML design, site administration, and the whole ball of wax—check your system regularly.

Keeping on Track

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After you’ve got your site up and running, and have come to understand the concessions you’ve made, you will be in a better position to reassess the long-range goals of your site, based on your original ideas and the obstacles you’ve found along the way. This reassessment will continue as you see what works and what doesn’t, and should never really be set in stone, but can act as a benchmark of sorts as your system continues to evolve. Some of the key issues you will want to address are

  • The overall communications objectives
  • The system’s look and feel
  • Bandwidth considerations
  • Navigation and operability

For example,

you might say that the communications objective of a site is to create public awareness; that the look and feel will incorporate a certain page layout, color scheme, and text treatment; that you won’t create pages over 50K for bandwidth considerations; and that you will include a site-wide navigation bar on all pages.

Now, this won’t mean that you will have to restrict your creativity to meet these standards,

but that you will have something to go off of as you assess new additions to your site. If you are the only author for a system, you can keep these standards in your head. If, however, there will be several sources providing pages, guidelines and standards will become necessary.

Managing Multiple Authors

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Marketing wants to post a product demo, sales wants to be able to update prices weekly,

customer service wants an ongoing FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) page, technical support wants to post updated diagrams, and the CIO wants everything to mesh seamlessly. What a nightmare!

If you are the webmaster for a large corporate site, you may find it beyond your ability to meet everyone’s needs yourself. Or,

if you are heading a design team, you may need a way to guide all of the different designers. Either way, managing multiple authors requires some special considerations, and there are some things you can do up front to make life a whole lot easier for everyone.

Keeping the Continuity

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Your first goal in designing or implementing a multiple author site is to achieve continuity. You don’t want your site to look piecemeal, even though it is. Viewers should be able to navigate through the site easily, using the same navigation tools throughout. They should be able to know that the information they’re looking for will be available in a certain format, and that charts, links, and tools will be laid out in some standard. Most importantly, someone should be able to access your site at any point and know that they’re on your site.

This requires that you set standards of authoring that specify exactly how a page will be laid out. This may sound like your site is going to lose some of its pizzazz, since you are trying to make each page look like the rest, but don’t worry about it. The point is not to make your site generic, but to make each page work within the structure. You can set whatever standards you want, as long as those standards can and will be met by each page on the system.

When you start getting into sites with hundreds or even thousands of pages, the concept of individual creativity starts to lose its appeal. Your focus should be on making the entire site an effective communications tool—not to make each page sizzle. In short, don’t lose sight of the forest for the trees. Now, to keep control of that big picture, you will need to set up some kind of authoring pecking order.

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