Question

Integrative Systems Project

What are some special maintenance issues and procedures that are especially relevant for websites?

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Answer 1

In today's world of digitalization, websites are the most important marketing tool of any business. It helps to establish credibility as a business and building your brand over the internet. Moreover, a website with the buying and selling functionality can help increase your sales drastically and it becomes easy for your proposed customers to have a look at your portfolio and buy your products without going anywhere.

Now, when the websites are that much important then it becomes very crucial to maintain it with topmost relevant content and free of bugs and errors.

Let's discuss a few of the issues that we may face while maintaining the websites.

1. For those businesses, who are selling their products online, it becomes very very important for them that their website remains up and running 24x7 without any downtime but even after paying more or hosting the website on a single server, it happens like sometimes the server went down due to some technical error or for maintenance activities. In such cases, it may cost a huge loss to the business with respect to potential customers.
2. Unethical hacking of the website is the most dreadful nightmare for the businesses allowing financial transactions on their website. The hackers may steal important information from the database like credit card details, customer details, clear all the transaction details, etc.
3. Some critical functions of your websites may not work correctly like shopping cart, contact form not recording email address/phone number of the prospect customer, login not working for site users, etc may be led to a  great loss of the business.
4. Young generations are now accessing websites through mobile devices and if the websites do not function well on the mobile then they search for your competitors who have mobile-friendly websites and buy their product instead.
5. Websites should be compatible with the latest version of all the top browsers else even though the products are good customers won't be able to buy them.
6. Incorrect or missing SSL certificate, issues with mod-rewrite, .htaccess and incorrect custom URL routes may cause internal breaking of the links may create a negative impression of your business in the customer's mind.
7. Links to external pages or websites that do not exist anymore also creates a negative impression of your business in the customer's mind and they may lose trust. Also, it affects the page rank, SEO and revenue.

Now let's discuss some of the steps or procedures that need to be taken while maintaining a website.

1. Validate the external links on a regular basis and change or delete them in case the external content has been removed.
2. Website content should be analyzed on a regular basis and any outdated or relevant content should be removed.
3. Proper SEO techniques should be applied in order to increase website ranking on search engines.
4. SSL certificate should be added and validated.
5. Browser compatibility checks should be done every few days in order to make sure that the website is working fine on the latest versions of all topmost browsers.
6. The website should be mobile-friendly and mobile apps should also get created for ease to the customer.
7. It needs to be taken care of that all of the critical functions of the website like shopping cart, contact form, etc are working fine for each of the use cases.
8. Security measures must be taken to protect the website from the hacker's attacks.
9. It should be taken care of that website do not go down at least in the peak hours or period.
10. To abide by several government laws, it must be taken care of that the privacy of the customer's data is maintained.