Maintain Your Website By Spending Less Time

By Author: Alan Smith
Total Articles: 1285
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It may happen that each website may not require the same updates, but websites would definitely benefit from regularly scheduled website maintenance and/or new additions. Regardless of what you update on your website or how often you require to do it, there are few proven methods to help you save time and improve your efficiency.

Let's look into few of the most helpful website maintenance tips:

Depending on how your templates are created, you can save Huge amounts of time by allowing the template or web editing software to perform repetitive tasks vs. you making them all on your own. A couple of examples might be your website's header, footer or common menu system. Let' say if each page of your website includes these common items, then you could save great time by having all of the pages call a "single file" that simply contains all of the requisite information for each respective section.

The correct way to do this is by using Server Side Includes (SSI), PHP includes or other programmatic "inclusion" files. The basis for these files is simple - you should put the information within a separate file and ...
... call it externally. Instead of attempting to re-hash how to do this for you here, it is suggested that you simply search for "how to uses it", "how to use server side includes" or "how to use PHP includes" in your favorite Search Engine.

Whenever you create a new image, whether you are thinking of it to edit it again in the future, it is advisable that you should always save a copy of the original format - .EPS, .PSD, .PNG or .AI files. Keeping the original artwork safe will help you in the future if any edits are required. You'll open the original image file and make your edits and then re-export the file for use on the web. Remember that failure to save your original files will require you to re-create the file each time you need to make even the smallest change - this is highly inefficient.

A common oversight for many webmasters and website maintenance companies; they simply fails to check the "last edited" date on a file that requires editing and then when they upload a newer version of the file, they simply overwrite important information that was meant to be part of the updates, in other words instead of replacing it. Always, check the last edited date of the remote files on the FTP server before you upload & overwrite them. One good practice is to download the latest version of the files you're editing prior to starting your changes.

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