Your work is not over once your website goes live - it needs to be constantly updated and refreshed. Make a commitment to review and improve your site regularly - the online landscape changes rapidly and you cannot afford for your business to be left behind.
Health checks
There are a couple of regular health checks you can do to ensure your website is compatible with modern web technologies:
- regularly test it from multiple computers with different screen sizes and various operating systems
- test your website from a smart phone - more and more people access the web through their smart phones.
Your website maintenance strategy
A website maintenance strategy begins with three important steps:
- Select a reliable, trusted and cost-effective host for your website.
- Work out what you need your content management system (CMS) to do now and in the future - you can get anything from a free off-the-shelf solution to a highly-customised proprietary system.
- Decide whether you want to maintain your site yourself or outsource this task.
Once you have launched your website using a good host and an appropriate CMS, give your customers a reason to return by regularly updating content and ensuring it is relevant and useful to them.
Stay abreast of new online tools, consumer behaviour and trends. Determine which of them need to be integrated into your website.
Get to understand search engine ranking and search engine optimisation and their role in improving your site's visibility. Google provides an overview of search engine optimisation and a starter guide.
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More information
On this site
Why have a website?
Types of websites
E-commerce on your website
Web accessibility
What to include on your website
Where to get help
Other websites
Websites and content - Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy
Digital learning resources - ForwardIT, Department of Further Education, Employment, Science and Technology