Do you provide fresh content?
What brings customers back to your website time and time again? – It’s
fresh content. We will help you keep your website up to date, whether it’s
by implementing a content management system or updating pages for you, which
will drive customer interest.
Perhaps the quickest and easiest way to post
fresh content to your existing site is to implement a blog. These are a few that
we can recommend to use:
- Community Server
A very powerful blog engine based on .NET technology. You can host it
alongside your existing website or choose a hosted plan
- WordPress
The favorite among bloggers. WordPress is based on PHP/MySQL combination
which is available on most hosting environment. It supports multiple
categories and password-protected content.
- Blogger
Blogger is perhaps one of the simplest blogging service out there. It's owned
by Google, so you can sign in using your Gmail account and start blogging
right away. Nice features worth mentioning include full access to
create/modify your blog template, great multi-user capability and the
option to upload your blog to your own FTP server.
Do you continually improve the user
interface?
As the web development industry matures, best practices of website
usability are continually improving. You should regularly update your
website's user interface to reflect these changes. Good examples are
breadcrumbs (seen at the top of this page) and cascading menus. Not only are
these features an easy way to find what you want and know where you
currently are in a website hierarchy, there are also standards that users
are becoming familiar with.
For a more detailed analysis on Website UI, read
Rules to Better Websites - Navigation,
Rules to Better Websites - Layout and
Rules to Better Websites - Graphics
SSW has talented designers who can improve the aesthetics and usability
by tweaking images, design and navigation of your website.
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Do you monitor your Google keywords?
Making sure that your site content to include specific keywords is just
one part of the story. You need to constantly monitor how they perform. Here
are a couple of ways you can achieve this:
Method 1: Use a SEO software
We found that WebCEO provides a
comprehensive features for managing and maintaining our keywords
- Figure: Using an SEO software such as WebCEO allows you to quickly see how your keywords are performing
Another method is to keep a file e.g. keyword.aspx which includes
We recommend that you do this as well as implementing some more from Rules to
Better Google Rankings
Do you perform competitive
analysis?
SSW will have several team members independently research your
competitors’ website, products and services to provide an unbiased
comparative report on:
- Website usability
- Ease of understanding business focus
- Effectiveness of product sales message
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Do you monitor Google's cache?
You need to make sure that all your pages are in the google cache as per SSW Link Auditor Google PageRank Report
Do you analyze your website
statistics (e.g. Google Analytics)?
There is a lot of information tucked away in your web server log files.
Valuable, but often unused, information that can be retrieved from your web
server log files include:
- Geographical origin of users
- Referring pages (which external pages did the users come from e.g.
search engines)
- Number of users
- Time spent on the website
- Reasons for user’s early departure
- Popularity of pages within your website
A sample template of Google Analytics report
Do you perform security and system
checks?
To maintain the stability of your server and help protect against harmful
attacks, your server should only be running necessary services, and all
software should have the latest updates.
This includes:
- Check that your operating system has the latest patches
- Check the system for software updates using SSW Diagnostics
- Check system event logs for software error reports
- Check the system is only running necessary services
Do you analyze your website's
performance?
For a smooth and responsive user experience, your site needs to be
checked for performance bottlenecks. These usually become noticeable
sometime after deployment, as your user base and quantity of content grows.
This includes:
- Check for and improve the slowest pages
- Check for and improve the compression of unnecessarily large images
- Check for and improve inefficient Ajax JavaScript code
- Check for and improve the slowest database queries
- Suggest appropriate use of Ajax to improve page responsiveness
Do you test on main browsers?
There are many browsers available, and each one renders HTML, CSS and Scripts differently. Making web pages look perfect in all of them is time consuming and expensive. You should provide support only to the main browsers, unless specifically requested by the client.
Your site should support (be tested):
- Internet Explorer 7 and later
- Mozilla Firefox
Your site should be readable on:
- Google Chrome
- Safari
- Opera
Do you perform user satisfaction
studies?
As part of an overall usability assessment, you should ask users about
their experience. SSW will prepare a balanced questionnaire for your user
base and contact selected customers for you. The objective is to find
weaknesses within the site that can be improved.
Do you respond to changing goals?
Websites are designed to communicate what the company is about as well as
the services and products which the company provides.
Do you have uptime report for your website?
Website should have uptime report to provide real-time and historical performance and availability information.
- Figure: Uptime report - no history information
With history information, you can get exact downtime of your website or services in the past.
- Figure: Uptime report - with history information
Do you have a zsValidate page to make sure your website is healthy?
Websites can be complicated, and a very small mistake can take the whole site down. But there are two different kind of errors, coding errors and deployment errors;
coding errors should be picked up by compiling and debugging, while deployment errors should be picked up by zsValidate page.
Whenever there is a deployment problem, instead of fixing it straight away, we find out what the cause of the problem is
and create a zsValidate test to prevent it happening again. So next time, when the site is down or re-deployed to a new server,
we can simply run the zsValidate page and fix all red crosses then the site should be back online.
SSW zsValidate
- Figure: SSW zsValidate Test
See SSW Rules - Do you have a zsValidate page to test your website dependencies?
Do you know the standard procedure to troubleshoot if a website is down?
When a site is down, you have to troubleshoot the problem. During troubleshooting, you might need to restart the IIS services. Here're several steps you can follow.
- Restart the website.
- If step 1 doesn't work, try to recycle the application pool of the site.
- If step 2 doesn't work, try to restart IIS.
- If step 3 doesn't work either, then reboot the web server machine (step 3 or step 4 is a severe action. You should get the approval of network administrators or ask them to do this).
- If the site is still not working, turn on the maintenance page and then try to reproduce the problem on the testing site. DO NOT connect your testing site to the production database. If you need the production database, make a copy of it and restore it to your testing machine.
Still not fixed? Escalate the issue. Please refer to SSW Website Maintenance Procedure.
Does every project have auto-generated maintenance pages?
Nowadays, most application are dealing with Data. And it would be nice to have maintenance pages to manage data (select, insert, update and delete).
We recommend you create the maintenance pages by netTiers. netTiers is a set of open source code templates used in CodeSmith for object-relational mapping. It automatically generates a personalized Data Tiers application (on a base of a SQL Server Database) in just a few minutes. With the application it generated, you can manage data of a web application easily and efficiently.
Please follow these steps to create your maintenance pages.
- Download CodeSmith.
- Download .netTiers and extract to a folder (e.g., C:\Program Files\Net Tiers)
- Install CodeSmith.
- Run C:\Program Files\Net Tiers\NetTiers.cst.
- Set requires properties following instructions.
- Figure: Properties Window
- Generate.
- Open the solution.
- Build it and run it in IE.
- Congratulations! It's up and running.
- Figure: The application is running
Code Smith enables to do this generate with a single command. If you want to generate it again, just run this command.
cs D:\DataDavidBian\Personal\New12345\NetTiers.csp
- Figure: An example of command line of Code Smith for NorthWind
We recommend you put this command in a file called "_Regenerate.bat" and add it in the solution in case you will generate it again in future.
Do you know how to find broken links?
Often times, web pages are dynamic. Most link scanners are not capable of submitting form information. The trick is to allow a
"door" for link scanner go through to scan a dynamic section of a site. A common technique is to hard coded hidden
link with a query string at the bottom of the page that allows the link scanner to follow in to the simulated user input. See our
knowledge base page for example. You will have to look in the HTML source, and find the following
code:
-
<a href='KB.aspx?KBID=Q1097707'><strong>Q1097707</strong>-How do I turn Option Strict on by default in VB.NET?</a>
- Figure: Example source code - finding broken links
It will return all the knowledge base articles in a paged format. The link scanner will click the Next Page link and eventually scan
through the entire knowledge base.
Google webmaster tools and Bing webmaster center are useful tools to monitor links.
- Figure: In Google webmaster tools you can see all broken URLs, and even the pages who are linking to them (known as referrer, found in the 'Linked From' column)
- Figure: In Bing webmaster center you can find the broken URL which is linked by the above URL