Articles about Web Design
Here we are posting a series of informative articles about websites - how to get one, what is involved, how much does it cost, what are the options, and more. As well, we'll share what we know about email, web browsers and the internet.
Care and Feeding of a Website |
| Jul 10 2010 at 4:24 PM |
It's January and raining - a good time to sit down with a cup of Galileo Coffee and go over your new year's business resolutions. To start, you type your website url into google and - horrors! - your site doesn't exist.
Frantic, you call Telus, your ISP, and they have no idea what you're talking about. You reboot your computer a few times. Then you call the person who designed your website last year and she asks: "Did you renew your domain name?"
This is a classic scenario, and it begins our article on Care and Feeding of a Website.
1. Keep track of your domain name.
What is the domain name login. When does it need to be renewed. And, where do the notices from your domain name registrar get sent?
Often people will purchase a domain name using an email, and then over the years discontinue that email. When the domain registrar tries to make contact, their emails are not received. Registrars make every effort to contact the owner of a domain name before taking it down.
This is particularly important for non-profit groups and other organizations that are run by volunteers. Volunteers come and go. Make sure the information about the domain is written down somewhere and passed on from one volunteer to the next. in fact, you can even create a 'hidden' page on your website where you can store your logins.
The info you need to keep regarding your domain name is this:
Domain Name
Registrar
Login to Domain (username, password, and some need user ID as well)
Current Administrative Contact
Administrative Contact's email
Information that can fit easily on a recipe card.
2. Visit your website now and then.
Your web designer will not be taking care of your website for you. You, or someone in your group, will need to visit the site now and then to make sure all is working properly.
Things change - technology is advancing at an extremely rapid rate. Servers are 'updating' their software, their databases, their security protocols and more. Servers can be hosting hundreds or even thousands of websites. The server operators won't contact all these websites, in fact they rarely contact the web designers.
If you visit your site and see a bunch of error messages instead of your company's beautiful pages, this can easily be fixed. Contact your web designer or webmaster and let them know.
If you have a 'feed' such as a blog or twitter feed, check that this is working properly. Again, these things can change and might require some tweaking or new codes. Flickr galleries are another area where you might need something tweaked now and then.
If you have a blog or news module with 'comment' fields you really need to keep an eye on this area - I recommend checking it once a day. Spam, drug and porn ads, and sometimes malfunctioning bots can fill this area up with hundreds of posts!
Your web designer will not be patrolling your website for you - unless you have a maintenance contract. Most designers have hundreds of clients - imagine the time it would take to patrol all those websites.
3. Consider an upgrade
A website needs to be upgraded every 3 years - or so.
Changes in monitor resolution, for example, has had a big impact on how a website looks. Any sites created 3 years ago will look small and strange. Back then, we made websites around 750 pixels wide. Now we are making them at least 900 if not 1000 pixels wide.
There have been many changes over the last five years - clients that come to me now wanting to update their old pages are advised to completely update their site. It would actually be cheaper to upgrade than have a webmaster struggle with your old html files.
Upgrade your Browser! Anything older than IE 7 will not display websites correctly. Browsers read code and that code is always changing. It's one of the biggest challenges for web construction these days - making the website compatible with all the different browsers: IE, Safari, Firefox, and now Google Chrome. And more recently iPhone, iPad, and ... well the list goes on and continues to grow.
Goodwin Studios recommends you use Firefox as your primary browser. Firefox is 'open source' and continues to set the standard for everyday use.
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