This is the third phase and the continuous part of web development. It’s the part that is mostly forgotten. We decide to discuss web management on this month’s issue and E-marketing next month.

When the web developers register the domain, provide hosting and develop and upload the website, most of the work ends there. They forget to support and manage the website. This result in the following:

• Out dated information in the website. Hence giving false information.
• Website hacking due to inactivity. And when it happens, it takes time to be noticed and rectified.
• Loss of information due to closure because of exceeded hosting limits.
• Getting banned or closure due to lack of activity.
• Rigidity of information indexing. This is bad for search engines. If information does not change in a website, then it crawls very slowly in search engines.

Therefore its necessary to understand the term. Web Management is compose of tasks both in; Domain and web Hosting (Phase 1) and Web Design (Phase 2). These phases were discussed in the september and october e-newsletter issues.

Domain & Hosting Support.

This is Web Support and Maintenance for Domains, E-mails and Hosting.

Domains: When one register the domain, the domain have several possibilities. These possibilities are used to enhance identity. For instance, one can be able to configure sub domains to be used in other web applications. E.g Blogs, Newsletters, intranet, CRM and even mini websites. One common example is where you configure a subdomain www.blog.yourdomain.com for use in blogging.

Emails: The organization uses e-mails more often than the website. Therefore there is need for greater support in emailing. A web developer should train on email use, email troubleshooting, password reset/regeneration, obsolete accounts deletion and new accounts reactivation and e-mail backup. What you should look for in email support are:

• Can you access the e-mails on the web and offline through outlook?
• Can you be able to set your own password (for security purposes)
• How many accounts can you set? Consider the hosting capacity.

Hosting: Web hosting determines the quantity of information to have in the website and also the number of e-mails to configure. Two things are considered; storage and bandwidth. Storage is where website and emails are stored. Bandwidth is the traffic or activity of the website and emails.

For instance, in a 500MB storage and bandwidth per month, you can host a website in 50MB and give 50MB to each of the 9 e-mail accounts. If the website enjoys a traffic of 50 MB per month, then each email account is supposed to traffic about the same amount every month. Incase the limit approaches, you will be prompted to delete emails to release space or slow down incase of bandwidth. Or buy more hosting.

The most important consideration when buying hosting is the number of users and their activity. This determines the storage and bandwidth to acquire.

Your web developer should be able to monitor this for you and advice you accordingly. One should be conscious when acquiring his domain and hosting package to ensure that the support is part of the package. Otherwise, there are situations where one pays for each support rendered per piece meal basis.

Website Updating and Maintenance

When a website is developed, its uploaded into the web server. In most cases, the website runs for years on the server without being changed. Organizations are very dynamic. They keep on changing and the same is the information in their website. There are different reasons why websites become outdated:

(1) Domain registration and hosting and web designer being different: In this case, you find that when the web designer designs the website, he takes his work has ended. And since the hosting company cannot update the website since they don’t know how to do it, the website content becomes outdated.You should ensure that you agree on who and how to do website content update. Or get one person to do all including maintenance.

(2) Use of outdate web programming languages. Some websites are developed with very rigid software that require that you download the site, update or redesign it and upload it again. That long process makes it hard and expensive to keep on updating the website. The use of web 2.0 technology has opened real time end user updating. You can be able to update your website instantly on the web server without the need of the web designer.

If you are looking for a web developer, seek one that will develop a site that you can be able to do minor update tasks like updating the text, image or even populating the photo gallery. This will make you have control of the site and also enable you keep up-to-date information in your site.

(3) Improper planning: When acquiring the services of a web designer, ensure you negotiate and agree on the maintenance contract.