Maintenance

1. Maintenance

2. Maintenance and Your Site • Most sites need to be updated on a regular basis. • Keeping your site low maintenance will give you more time to work on other tasks. • Planning can help you • Development tools and utilities can help you.

3. Planning: Directories • Small sites: • All files in one directory • HTML files in one directory, images in another • Larger sites: • Each subcategory has it’s own directory (and possibly other subdirectories) • Chronological structure • Content is organized by date • like many magazines and news sources

4. More Planning: Naming • Use short, descriptive names resulting in URLs that are easy to remember. • Pay attention to case (a is different than A) • Use lowercase letters for folders & filenames. • Do not use spaces or special characters (like |, &, *, %, etc.). • Only use periods before the extension (like .html or .gif) • Do not include more than one extension in your filename. (for example: my.dog.picture.gif)

5. More Planning: Relative Links • Saves time on downloading compared to absolute links • Makes your site portable • Less typing if you are coding HTML yourself - less chance for typos too.

6. Development Tools • Most commercial development tools provide site management tools. • GoLive, Frontpage, Dreamweaver • For example, FTP that uploads only pages that have changed. • Also, the capability to update relative links when you move or rename files.

7. Utilities • Link Checkers - test your site’s hyperlinks and presents a report of findings • External links may disappear • Manual checking can be a misuse of your time • LinkRunner (commercial), Theseus (shareware) • Site Mapper - creates a site map • A navigation tool for site visitors (like an index) • As your site evolves, so must your map/index • Joust Outliner (freeware)

8. Utilities • Search Engines-related utilities • Submits your site to several search engines • HTML optimizers • Accessibility Checkers • Bobby (http://www.cast.org/bobby/) • Among others..