Website maintenance is often overlooked in the drive to get a new site up and running. The focus is on getting content on the website asap, images added, all sorts of bells and whistles installed, and a multitude of pages uploaded to the web server. But considering the following issues as you’re creating your website won’t cost you any more and will assure that you’ll end up with a website that’s easy to maintain and update.

1. Keep Your Web Page Structure Simple

How often have you visited websites where each web page looks like it was created by a different developer? Colors are not standard, navigation options differ from page to page, fonts differ, and images differ in size and placement. Each page is a design task in its own right.

If the maintenance process is to be sped up, pages must have common layout and design standards. Page width and structure should be tightly defined, for example page width could be 950 pixels, the menu column 200 pixels wide, and the title banner 950 x 150 pixels. The rest of the page can be divided into simple chunks as necessary, but avoid the temptation to create too many controlled spaces. A few well-defined areas in which the content can flow freely are all that is required.

Of course, if you use a blogging platform like WordPress, the structure is automatically set up and each page and post will be uniform in design.

2. Use a Style Sheet

If your website has 100 pages and you want to change the font color using HTML, that will have to be done individually on each page. The same is true for any other aspect of the page design that is specified in HTML tags.

By using a CSS style sheet however, the style definition can be contained on one page, and a change to a value in the style sheet will be reflected instantaneously on all web pages using it. An important consideration is that when using a style sheet you should use the current industry standard of CSS code. There are obscure options that can be recognized by particular makes and versions of browsers, but if maintenance is to be kept simple you should only use CSS code that can be interpreted by all browsers.

3. Use a Simple Site Folder Structure

In an attempt to be highly organized and in control, some website developers create lots of folders and subfolders to hold web pages and other content. Multiple backup copies are created, and before long the developers aren’t sure which version of the site is live and what represents ‘current’ content. The opposite problem can also arise where all files used in a website are uploaded into a single root folder. Finding an individual web page becomes cumbersome due to the volume of files. For an easy-maintenance website, keep your web pages in the root folder, images in an ‘images’ folder, and any other documents such as PDFs or spreadsheets in a ‘docs’ folder.

4. Use Meaningful Data Names

Just because you can give a file or image any name you want, does not mean it is a good idea to do so. There are two reasons for this.

– The nature and content of an item will be instantly recognizable if its name reflects its content, for example ‘button-home.jpg’
– If the name of files and folders contain words used in search engine queries, the page may be deemed to be more relevant to that query.

The use of images in a web page can be simplified if their size is included in the image name, for example ‘beach300x220.jpg’. Standardizing image sizes can make life even more simple when using the same images on several pages, or mixing images. Of course, if you don’t want your images to show up in image search, do not use a descriptive word for the file, title or alt tag. On the other hand, image search can bring additional traffic to your site.

5. The Live Website Should Mirror the Development Site

Some developers tend to keep many versions of web pages and images in a variety of folders. As a result, they often get mixed up when uploading the live version. Even worse, using ‘Save As’ in Dreamweaver for example to save a web page in a different folder results in references to page components such as images having a directory file path as part of their reference, for example ‘file:///C|/websites/images/title.jpg’. When uploaded to the server, the addresses for images etc. no longer work.

To avoid this problem, ensure that the folder and file structure on your development computer is a direct copy of the folder structure on the web server. That way, all relative file references will continue to work.

The overriding principle in creating websites that are easily maintained is that the structure of the site and individual web pages should be simple and consistent. Develop your own familiar standards, and when you have to revisit that site you haven’t worked on in a while, you will be able to make changes quickly and efficiently.

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