| Even after you design and build your site and get it online, the costs continue. After all, you have to maintain your site so it works properly and remains up-to-date. This is where your Web developer ”whether it's you, an in-house person, or a Web consultant ”will be kept relatively busy. The costs, therefore, will be related to the cost of that person. What does maintenance include? Here are a few things that I do every day/week/month on the Web sites I maintain: -
Add fresh content. By far, this is the most time-consuming chore. Only by adding new information can you keep your site interesting to repeat visitors . On one of my sites (wickenburg-az.com), I add new content several times a week. -
Repair broken links. It's a fact of the Webmaster's life: links to external sites go bad. Rather than let one of my visitors get an "Error 404" message from a link on my site, I check and repair (or remove) links once every month or so. -
Tweak appearance, organization, and navigation. If you (or your Webmaster) are truly dedicated to the health and well-being of your Web site, you'll constantly be looking for ways to make it better, faster, more logically organized, and easier to navigate. Then you'll put your plans into action by tweaking pages as necessary to make them better. Of course, if your Web site is nothing more than an online brochure or catalog, you probably won't have much to maintain. But I hope your site will be more than that. It can be. |
