1st Site Free

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Step 7 - Maintain Your Site.

For your Website to be a success you must maintain it. If you expect visitors to return, you must provide them with something new, correct errors and keep your site up to date. In addition, you must continue to monitor your search engine ranking, continue to promote your Website and find out who is linking to your site.

Outputs for this step are: 1) A maintenance plan for your site. 2) Updated pages for your Website based on your maintenance plan. 3) Determine your search engine ranking. 4) Find out who's linking to your site. 5) Get an award for your site. 6) Take additional promotion actions.

How to maintain your website

Having a Website means your job is never done. The Web changes, your information changes and your site must change with it.

Why maintain. Maintenance of a Website is performed for several reasons. These include:

• The average life of a Web page is only 75 - 100 days.
• To enhance and/or improve the design.
• To update or add additional information.
• To respond to visitor's comments/ recommendations.
• To correct errors and design problems.
• Static Websites soon die from lack of interest.

General maintenance guidelines:

• Keeping a Website current isn't a gimmick. If your site is not updated regularly, visitors will not bother to return. If you don't occasionally offer new information or resources, you're not giving visitors any reason to return. No matter how well publicized your site is, if you don't maintain it, it will decline in popularity.
• Keep it simple. Creating new and complicated web pages, will only mean more work for you.
• Be reliable, If you promise monthly updates, make sure you live up to your word. Do not offer anything that you can not deliver.
• Take any feedback you have received seriously and reply as soon as possible, and thank the visitor. If the feedback contains ideas on improving your site or correcting errors, evaluate each one. If you plan to add the suggestion, send an e-mail to the person who suggested it and indicate that they should return to your site on (specify a date) and see their idea in action.
• A What's New?" page can keep your return visitors up to date on what has changed since their last visit. You should also place a small "new" graphic next to items that have recently been updated, or added to your site.
• Link Valet is a WWW Link checker. When you enter the index URL of your home page, Link Valet will spider your site. Link Valet.
• If you have a Website that contains more than ten (10) pages, I recommend you check your Website's internal and external links by downloading and installing Xenu's Link Sleuth™ on you're PC. Best of all it's free. Runs on Windows 95, 98, NT, 2000 and Windows XP. File size: 230 Kb.
• If you make a change to a page, no matter how small, always validate your HTML code.
• Spell check all changed pages.
• Proof read your changed pages before you upload them.
• Always develop your new pages on your local computer, and then upload them to your Website, only after they work correctly.
• At minimum you should retrieve and archive a backup copy of site content once each week. Always retain a backup copy of your Website on a diskette, as well as your hard drive.
• MediaMax. MediaMax provides 25 GBs free online backup space for videos, photos, music, files, and work-related documents. Once you upload files to your account, they are automatically backed up and accessible online 24-hours per day.

How Often Should You Update Your Site? It depends on what you have to offer your visitors. A poll conducted recently at 1st Site Free revealed the following results:

Monitor your Website host. Your first and foremost priority is ensuring Website up. Would you like to monitor your host every 15 minutes and be notified when it goes down? If your site is unreachable, Uptime will e-mail you and will continue to check your site until it becomes reachable again. See this page: I want to monitor my site.

Speed up. Every Web usability study I have read since 1998 has shown the same thing: surfers want Webmasters to speed up their page downloads. Graphics optimization is key for fast Webpage downloading. Graphics programs are available to optimize the file size and quality of GIFs, JPEGs, and PNGs to varying degrees. Most images can be greatly reduced in size, and it’s amazing to see how much you can improve the speed of your Webpages. You don't even have to install any software and it's extremely easy! See how you can speed up your site.

Download Time for This Page: *

Check your download time. If a page doesn't load in 8 seconds at 56Kbps, you'll lose 1/3 of your visitors.

Content Is King. One of the biggest problems any Website owner has is finding good content. Content is what brings your visitors to a site in the first place. If your pages aren't updated and new content isn't added, your Website will become ineffective. These sites will provide you free content for your Web pages.

Style sheets. If you are familiar with HTML and the basics of building Web pages, its time for you learn about the benefits of using style sheets (known as, Cascading Style Sheets). By using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) you can save a lot of work, control the style and layout of one page, multiple Web pages or your Website all at once.

Future Enhancements. After your Website is operational for a few months you might want to consider adding enhancements and new features, such as: a guest book, counter, graphics, free banners, logos, buttons, a personal search engine, web poll and links for Webmasters. Check out this page for some ideas.

How can I ...?

• Add a custom 404 (file not found) page to my site?
• Add a Favicon to my site?
• Allow people to download files from my site?
• Do you have a how can I question? Visit the "How can I page"?.

Tips for Webmasters The information on this page is updated daily.

Increase Your Knowledge. If you own a Website you must continue to learn. These sites will help you get started.

Add user generated content. Today's buzzword is oser generated content. What is it?

Free video hosting sites. Upload your videos to these sites for free.

Add Some Scripts To Your Site. If you are new at creating a Website, did you know there are CGI scripts and JavaSripts available that you can add to your pages for free?

• Even if your Web host doesn't allow or provide CGI scripts, you can use these CGI scripts to add message boards, guestbooks, form mail, counters, clocks and chat rooms to your site for free. To learn more about CGI hosted scripts.
• You can use JavaScripts on any site. But, your visitor's browser must be Java enabled. To learn more about JavaScripts and how to add them to your pages for free click here.

Where Do You Rank? AltaVista, Ask, Excite, FAST Search, Google, Hotbot, Lycos, MSN Search and Yahoo.

Web log analysis? Web log analysis software allows you to generate useful statistics about your Website and your visitors from your log files.

Has any one stole your articles? ? One of my users found a Website had stolen my Website content to promote their own services! Find out who's using your work without authorization (for free!) at: http://www.copyscape.com/

Re-register your site. Register your site again with the major search engines if you:

• Change your URL.
• Change the title of your listing.
• Change the content of a Web page.
• Change your description and/or keywords.
• Require an additional or different categories for your listing.
• Change your e-mail address, if it is associated with your listing.
• Continue to promote, promote, promote.

Nominate Your Site For An Award. You need a reward yourself after all your hard work! Visit my Website Awards Worksheet link and apply for awards around the World.

Internet security. Hardly a day goes by that I don't read about another security breach. Every computer on a network like the Internet is at risk. Do you know how vulnerable your computer is? Gibson Research Corporation offers a free service that tests your PC security.

Get Your Own Domain Name. If you are a serious about your business, a domain name is the best investment you can make. You can now register domain names up to 67 characters in length, including the .com or .net or .org extensions. You are no longer limited to 23 characters for your domain name! Registering a domain name involves filling out a form and paying a registration See my new tutorial on How to Register a Domain Name.

E-Commerce. If you want to sell something on your Website you need to learn about E-commerce. Getting started with E-commerce.

Blog tutorial. Create Your First Blog. These days, about all it takes to become a blogger is an Internet connection, a little spare time, and opinion on a subjects that you're not afraid to share with the world.

A few almost final words. Remember, people are more likely to return to your site, if you keep it tidy, spell checked, validated and up-to-date.

Final words. Bookmark this site and come back often. New things are added every month. Don't forget to leave your link at my FFA link page.

Do You Need Help? Don't be shy, if you have questions or need help creating your Website, just ask me. I work cheap -- free. The only dumb question is the one not asked!

If you find this Website useful, donate as little as a $1.00 through the Amazon Honor System to help me keep it free. Paying is fast and easy: just click the Pay now button to begin. Your credit card is secure. Your privacy is protected.