e-business operations - website maintenance

Once a business has set up its website, it requires maintenance, just like any other part of the firm’s operations. Unless the website only offers the very minimum in information, it will need to be refreshed, updated and corrected on a regular basis. How this is done will partly depend on whether the business built its own website, or used an external agency to do it.

External agency

If the firm used an external web agency to build its website, then it should consider having a maintenance agreement with that agency to carry out such amendments and modifications as are needed.

Internally-built website

If the business built its own website, then it will be necessary for someone internally to allow time to keep the information up to date.

Whether managed internally or externally, the key areas that must be refreshed include:

Changes in address or telephone numbers.

New branding, logos and so on.

The catalogue (if any) must be kept up to date, including new products and removing any that are no longer offered - this can be helped by having a catalogue that shows whether the product is in stock or not. Some potential customers will not bother to place an order for something listed as out of stock, so some businesses choose not to disclose this as long as they can get hold of stock quickly.

Businesses that use their website extensively will tend to keep it refreshed with news of new products, promotions, events and so on.

A key feature of many website packages is to have a message that states when the website was last updated, so that loyal customers can look out for what’s new.

Another useful feature is the number of visitors counter, so that everyone can see how popular the website is (or is not!).
External links - it is worthwhile checking all links regularly to ensure that they are still all current.

Website statistics & diagnostics

The ISP or the website package itself will provide a certain level of information about usage levels of the various sections of the site. Typically, reports can also be provided about ‘broken links’ where links within the website or to external sits are no longer working properly.

Monitoring service levels

The ISP will provide reports on any downtime that has affected the website, and it is also possible to sign up for external services that regularly test the website across the Internet to draw attention to any downtime.

Search Engines

See the note on promoting a business online. It will be necessary to re-advise search engines of the website so that it keeps coming up on searches. It is possible to purchase software that does this on the firm’s behalf.

Review of Promotion

See the note on promoting a business online. Again, the promotional strategy should be reviewed regularly in the light of performance – there are plenty of other possibilities if the current strategy is not cost-effective.

Author: Steve Whiteley, January 2007

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