How do I maintain my website content?

Web Cafe Media often maintains the sites
we build, however we know that sometimes the site owner wants to handle it on their own. With that in mind, we offer these words of advice for those new to website maintenance, which is much more than just keeping the site live!

	Backup Ensuring the website files are backed up frequently is crucial. Keep a copy of your website on your local computer and back it up regularly.
	Link Checking If your website has outbound links (and most do) these links should be checked regularly in case the URL on the destination website has changed.
	Maintain The Site Style When updating a web page, be sure and maintain the site "look and feel". Modern websites have font and layout styles defined in a "stylesheet" file, known as CSS.
	Maintain File Names If a PDF file is replaced with a newer one, keep the file name the same so that links to the file do not have to be revised, the search engines will not need to update their indexes, and "page not found" errors will be avoided.
	Maintain Search Engine Optimization Every modern website that wants to rank well in the search engines natural search results has been "search engine optimized". That means that throughout the site, keyword search terms have been used in a variety of ways to optimize page ranking in the search engines. If those terms are altered or replaced, that may negatively impact site ranking. If you have to revise the content on a web page, do not alter the embedded search terms without carefully considering the consequences.
	Check Changes In Multiple Browsers Different web browsers can and regularly do interpret the same HTML differently! Every time you make a change to a web page, view the page in Windows IE, Netscape, and Firefox, and also in Mac Firefox, Safari, and Netscape. You do not want to have your website visitors seeing a messed up page layout.