Site management

Helen Bradley and John Hilvert look at what is involved in managing your site and some handy tools and design ideas for making the process easier.

Maintaining your Web site is all about site management. It's a process that is generally misunderstood and hated, the mere thought of which strikes fear and loathing into the heart of even the most enthusiastic Webmaster.

This month we take a look at the phenomenon of uncontrolled Web site growth, broken links, the need of site make overs and ways of dealing with them through modular design such as style sheets and software techniques.

If you're ever stuck for ideas about how to improve your site, ask your users. They're the best source of information about your site; what works and what doesn't and where improvements can be made. Users appreciate being asked and you'll find them quite forthcoming in their comments. A feedback form on your site asking your users for comments and ideas is all you need to get the process started.

You should also check how your site rates on the Web radar space. You can use AltaVista to identify how many and which sites reference your site; for example, the query ^link:mysite.com.au> will find all pages linking to mysite.com.au. Also check how easy it is for your site to be found by querying its main features in a search engine. These free and easy checks can indicate new marketing strategies as part of your site management.

When you've decided on the revised site structure and look you can move your existing information over to the new design. Even with a good HTML editor, this can be a huge task involving mind numbing hours of cutting, pasting, reformatting and testing.

If the site is large then the task of gathering all the disparate pieces together to restructure it can be enormously complex. Resist the temptation to keep adding to it in an ad hoc manner and instead face the job of bringing it into some sort of order.

So, is the task of maintaining a site as large as it first appears? With good initial design and the help of some site management tools, you can reduce the workload involved in maintaining it significantly.

Consistency: Design your site so that each page looks like it 'belongs'. Consistent design makes it quicker to construct each page and makes it easier to update, too. Be consistent in the size and shape of graphics, buttons and text, in the colour and position of objects, text and links and at a more technical level, ensure that the layout of the HTML source follows the same logical structure on each page.

Modularity: Programs such as FrontPage 97 allow you to design a Web page by piecing together a number of separate parts such as a navigation bar, a footer containing contact and design information, and your company logo. These parts of the page are created as small, individual Web pages and the Include Bot is used to add them to each page that they're to appear in. At a later date, if a change is made, the Web page containing the relevant part is altered and all other pages that have been set up to include this page are automatically altered.

Using Include Bots speeds up the process of creating a site by removing the need to cut and paste HTML source. They also make the process of updating repeating elements easier and help you maintain consistency of layout from one page to the next.

If you aren't using FrontPage you can alter text in a number of Web pages using a search and replace tool. But you'll need a smart HTML editor that allows you to search and replace over a number of HTML files at once or you'll have to run a separate search and replace for every page on your site.

Files and Directories: Identify the various functional areas of your site from your site plan. Placing the files for each functional area in a separate directory will make file management easier. You can remove an entire area by removing the directory containing the files and you'll find that directory listings are more manageable because they'll be shorter.

Develop a clear and consistent way of naming your files so you can easily identify them. For example, a filename like 10268.gif tells you very little about the contents, whereas logo_lrg.gif suggests the file contains a large version of a logo. The clearer your naming conventions, the easier it is to locate and identify images and files.

Information stored in a Database: If your site is text intensive then the best way to display your text may be storing the text in a database and creating your pages 'on the fly'. A good example of this is the Microsoft Knowledge base. When you search the Knowledge base for information, the search results are sent to a basic Web page structure and the page is created as you wait. Later, when you select an individual article, the article's text is sent to another page structure still. The HTML source and the text for the page are kept in separate locations and merged together at your request to form the page you see on your monitor.

Designing a site this way involves creating a single page structure that is repeatedly reused to display the results returned from a search of the database. Updating a site designed this way involves changing only a few pages even if the database contains sufficient information to create a few thousand different ones.

There're a number of products available to help you design a database-based site, including Lotus Domino, Backstage Internet Studio and NetObjects Fusion.
Sharing the tasks: Sharing the task of creating a Web site won't necessarily reduce the work involved but it can make life much easier. If you can outsource some of the work of creating the HTML files, it may mean the site is created faster or that your time can be better utilised.

Before you can share the authoring of a site you need to put in place detailed guidelines regarding consistency. This forces you to pre-plan the site structure, general look, specific page details, filenaming conventions etc, so that the people working on the project know what's required and have a standard to operate to. Without stringent guidelines you risk ending up with a mess of pages all prepared to differing specifications.

Style sheets help you create pages that are consistent and they are a particularly handy tool when you are sharing the authoring of a site. Style sheets allow you to specify a 'look' for any element on a page. For example, if you want a certain level of heading to be 25 point, red, Comic Sans text, you can create a style for this and apply it to every piece of heading text on your page. To change the font you'll change the specifications in the style itself (which resides in the <HEAD>...</HEAD> area of the page) and all the text in the document which is formatted to that style will alter, too. Style sheets are 'cascading' in that they can be designed to affect different levels of a site from the whole of your site, down to an individual page or a page element.

Prioritise your update: If you have a large site you can better allocate your time and effort towards managing it if you know those areas that are most frequently visited. It's inefficient to spend time updating an area that is not visited often if you're doing this at the cost of updating more popular areas. If you look into it, you may find that as few as 20 per cent of your pages are accounting for 80 per cent of the interest. This 20 per cent of your site is the area that should be getting priority attention.

You can find out what areas users are visiting from the statistics that are generated by your server. You can also get information about the domains users come from, the periods of high and low interest and even which browsers are being used. If you're suffering from a resource crunch, focus on those parts of your site that are really garnering interest and deal with the less popular sections later.

Design for updating: Design your site to be altered in the future. Keep in mind that it will need to be regularly updated, that new pages and, perhaps, sections will need to be added and it will need a make over within a year of its implementation. Making sensible decisions and planning for the future at this stage can reduce the management overhead dramatically.

Even simple systems for recording the date and description of alterations made to a Web page can save time and effort searching for the information. Design a system for updating pages, decide which copy of a page you'll use to update it -- the copy from your Web site or a backup copy stored elsewhere, and develop a system for checking that each altered page is uploaded and tested and that a new backup copy is made.

Unbroken links: Use a link checking program such as Cyberspyder to check both the internal and external links on your site. These programs search your site to locate all your links, test each of them and report back any that don't function. On a site with a large number of links, regularly running a link checking program will quickly identify areas requiring attention.

Using frames and JavaScript: Designing your site using a frame layout allows you to place changeable layout elements such as navigation areas in a small frame to one side of the screen and your other content in the larger central frame. You can then update your navigation area by altering only a few documents. In contrast, without frames, with a navigation menu on every page a change to the menu means a change to every page.

Similarly there are JavaScripts that allow you to modularise your design. For example, you can place the navigation area of a page in an HTML document and then use a script to incorporate this document by reference in any other page on your site. This is the equivalent to using a header or footer in a word processor, with the result that to change the navigation area you change the single HTML document containing the navigation source, rather than each individual page.

Plan to update: It's easy to get so busy adding new pages to your site that you overlook the existing pages to the extent that they become seriously outdated. To avoid this, plan the review of your site and schedule it so that each page is considered for relevance and accuracy on a regular basis, say a minimum of twice a year. When your plan is on paper you can see the overall maintenance load more clearly. Also include on your plan a date for the next major site make over.

2. Online Planet (tm) -- Web site management directory:
http://www.onlineplanet.com/websitemgmt.htm

3. Web site management, maintenance, marketing etc:
http://www.doublebarrel.com/sitemngmt.htm

4. 2943 Web Publishers: Web-Site Management:
http://www.2943web.inter.net/2943p4.htm

5. HTML Grinder -- Web site management:
http://www.matterform.com/grinder/

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