website maintenance
Keep it timely or don't post it at all
A website is a lot like a bulletin board
- people expect it
to hold current and authoritative information, and your reputation can be
hurt if your
information is obsolete. A tax accountant that has the 2006 tax tables posted
on his website will hardly inspire confidence. If you know that you will
not be making changes often, you would be better off not posting data that
you know will become obsolete quickly. In this case, you should treat your
website more like a printed brochure, and only post more general information.
Maintenance Alternatives
Having your website designer handle your updates is certainly an option,
however there are a number of tools that allow interested customers to handle
many changes in-house. These tools are fairly simple to learn, do not require
writing any HTML or CSS code, and can be set up to protect the more delicate
parts of the webpage, such as the navigational structure.
- InDesign is a web based application provided by Adobe
that is structured to work with web pages designed with Dreamweaver. For
the time being, there is
no charge for using InDesign. With InDesign, text can be added, deleted,
and edited, images can be added or deleted, and links can also be added,
edited, or deleted. Which parts of each page that can
be edited must be be specified in advance. Typically, shared parts of the
website, such as headers, navigational menus, etc. are locked, and the
content areas are editable. The tool has administrative functions built
in to specify who can use it.
- Contribute is a software program which is
similar to InDesign in its capabilities. It can do everything that InDesign
can do, plus has some additional flexibility with CSS styles. It's security
is more complex than InDesign's, in that users can be authorized by page,
so that the sales department cannot change the employment pages, and vice-versa. Contribute allows
off-line editing, and keeps several levels of backups, allowing the return
to previous versions if necessary. As in InDesign, which sections
of your web pages that can be edited must be predefined. Copies of Contribute
currently list for $199. Unfortunately InDesign and Contribute are not
compatable; only one can be used on a website.
