Keeping Your Virtual Existence Alive

Maintaining and/or Managing Your Website

April 18, 2007 by Valerie Anderson

Congratulations!  You now have published to your own domain name a website, so what’s next?  Plenty of possibly not much, depending on the purpose and subsequent design of your site.

For example, you might have chosen to develop a simple 4 page site with a “contact us” page connecting you to your visitors.  The only managing you will be doing in this scenario would be to promptly respond to any legitimate emails.  As for actual site maintenance, you might have decided there was value for you to update the display ad space on each page with a monthly special offering.  Keeping content fresh is a maintenance-orientated task.

On the other hand, you may have developed a website that demands weekly updates and a blog has been attached to the site to accommodate this need.  The time demands will be greater, but so are the potential rewards from such an effort.

Make sure you are prepared to keep an eye on how your website is performing on your behalf.  Maybe you’ll discover a Frequently Asked Questions page can quickly assist your visitor in addressing possible concerns.  This can significantly reduce the number of emails sent to you requesting such information, which means you will be responding to less research-based inquiries and instead translates into more sales via your website.

Keep in mind your site is being broadcast in a live format world wide and the bottom line is that until you take your website off-line, there will always be the prospect of maintaining and managing your online existence in some manner.  There are strategies for any budget, from free to thousands of dollars to help drive traffic to your site that even you can learn how to perform.  You can learn how to publish free advertisements to various directories and you may very well decide you want to learn HTML programming on your own.

So what’s next?  That’s up to you.