[thelist] web site maintenance woes (rant)

[Williams, Alice]

Hi,
I have recently been tasked with providing remote sites with training materials, software guides and other stuff.  So I picked up a couple of books to help me with the content management which was the first "oh my go.." realization.  So here they are if you'd like to check them out.  The first one is management for launching or relaunching a site but it has a web site that offers some useful forms.
Workflow that Works by kelly Goto & Emily Cotler www.web-redesign.com
and
Content Management Bible by Bob Boiko.

Hope this helps.
Alice
-----Original Message-----
From: Chris Mason [mailto:masonc at masonc.com]
Sent: Tuesday, July 23, 2002 7:07 PM
To: thelist at lists.evolt.org
Subject: RE: [thelist] web site maintenance woes (rant)


Let me address these issues also
>
> But updating the content is a very small piece of the overall work of
> maintenance.
Depending on the site. If your aim is to have a site that is constantly
changing, it's the biggest of the tasks. What's the point of a website
that has little content - that's whats known as a fluff site.


There's also all the stuff like search engine positioning,
Content and change brings traffic, that's why we are so keen on large
amounts of it. For instance, try this:
http://www.google.com/search?q=rum%20punch
Look who's number 4
and this
http://www.google.com/search?q=anguilla
between 1 and 4 consistantly
One of the advantages of eZPublish is that it will produce the
meta-keywords from the article content. Another is the URLs are real,
not queries, and search engines prefer that.
Compare

http://www.anguillaguide.com/article/articleview/372/1/77/

which looks like a static url to a search engine, with

http://www.domain.com/index.php?article=123&cat=45

which search engines will not follow.

The meta-description is taken from the article lead-in so that changes
for each page also. Imagine trying to get users to do this manually.

> log/traffic analysis,

Built into eZPublish

link checking,
No need mostly, menus are dynamic, so only hard coded links can be
wrong.

 tech support for the users,
A lot less goes wrong when it's dynamic


 tweaking site architecture,
Pretty hard to do with static content

maintaining any databases the site uses
all done through the admin interface

, updating forms,
users can do this

> servicing sponsor agreements,
Click throughs are shown, easy to add revenue stats

creating ads, etc.
Design, which is what we would prefer to be doing.


>
> Right now the site I manage contains 2,629 files (only about 1300 of which
> are web pages, the rest are scripts, images, etc).

 Of course, that doesn't
> include all of the content that resides in databases. I cringe every time
> someone asks me to add a whole new collection of material to the site,
> because I feel overwhelmed trying to keep up with the existing site.

That's why you need a CMS. Let the users add their own content. You can
concentrate on promotionl, design and coding.



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