A web site is an incredible tool to communicate information or to market products. Be aware, however, that after you have made the initial investment and your web site is up and running, the bigger job still lies ahead - keeping it updated and maintained.

Maintenance is an important part of life. If you don't take care of your health, you'll get sick. if you don't paint your house, it will rot. If you don't change the oil in your car, you will need to replace the engine. Dentists communicate the importance of regular dental maintenance by saying, "Ignore your teeth, and they'll go away."

The same is true with your web site. Despite all the time or money you put into creating it, if you neglect it, before long it will provide little benefit. The success of a web site is largely dependent on the amount of attention and maintenance put into it.

Why Regular Web Maintenance is Important

(1) Fresh content keeps visitors coming. Every web site should routinely feature new content, text, graphics and images. Some sites benefit from adding special features from time. Don't limit the web site to a static, stale presentation. Spend the time and resources to maintain freshness, usefulness and relevancy.

(2) Websites should continually evolve to meet the needs of the audience or client base and reflect new technologies and new browser versions. Often there is value in adding a better search tool, automated forms, a mailing list database or other interactive functions. Over time you will probably discover better ways to organize the information and improve usability of the site.

(3) The success of your website is largely dependent on whether people can find your site from a search engine. Search engines constantly change the way they rank and display sites, and some search engines will not index your site at all unless your pages contain well-structured content, error-free HTML code or appropriate tags. Achieving a good position in the search engine requires regular maintenance to assure that the web site remains listed properly.

(4) Web sites require regular technical support to keep them running smoothly. The information highway has its share of potholes and road hazards. The host server needs to be monitored to be sure it is doing what it is supposed to, that files and file directory structures remain intact, and that all the links are still functional. Regular review of site statistics is helpful to see how much traffic the web site is getting and where it's coming from, in order to evaluate the overall effectiveness of the web site. Anyone who relies on their web site for business purposes should have it monitored daily.

Maintaining Your Site

Maintaining a small web site may take as little as a few hours a month. Maintaining a large web site can be a full-time. However, whether large or small, outsourcing your web maintenance can be a very smart choice. MMJ Technology has an variety of technical resources, personnel and programmers available whose web experience easily exceeds that of any company's web staff. Outsourcing saves value resource dollars in terms personnel, benefits or office space.