SSW Rules to Better Websites - Tuning and Maintenance

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 login 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.

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

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

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 new browsers?

Microsoft does not have a monopoly anymore in terms of browsers; Mozilla has been gaining traction and Safari is used on the Macintosh.

Your site should support:

• IE7
• IE6
• Mozilla Firefox
• Safari
• IE5.5
• 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 how to migrate ASP.Net 1.1 to 2.0?

1. Restart IIS.
2. Backup the web site folder and rename it to SSW_ASPNET1-1_OLD to keep a safe copy of your website.
3. Run Treesize to determine which folders can be excluded. For example, “Download?isn’t included in web solution, so this folder can be excluded. The reason why we use Treesize is because it will tell you which folder is the biggest and this will help you to make the decision.

   

   Figure: Treesize

4. Install the latest Code Auditor which contains many coding rules. Scanning by Code Auditor will help you to keep your web site healthy. You can uncheck the rules if you think they are not critical. For example:
   1. WEB ?CSS stylesheets must specify a font.
   2. WEB ?Do not use codebase or ClassID in object tag.
   3. WEB ?No email address in all web pages.

   

   Figure: Uncheck the non-critical rules

5. You can also select your folder and exclude the unnecessary files.

   

   Figure: Select folder and exclude files

6. Run Code Auditor to scan and check the report, fix any errors.

   

   Figure: Scan result

7. Run the ASP.NET 2.0 conversion on your solution in VS2005.

   

   Figure: Conversion in VS2005

8. Check the conversion report and find if there are any errors in this process. Compile in VS2005 and fix all the errors.

   

   Figure: Conversion report

   There are some common errors like:
   If you see errors such as "ControlName" is not declared, then you most probably
   
   1. Have a problem with imports. In the previous version you could have imports on the whole project in VB. Now you cannot and must specify imports on a per file basis. For example: the error "Name 'ReportFilter" Is not declared can be resolved by.
   2. Your pages may not have valid closing tags. The ASP.NET 2.0 declaration model for controls means that the page must be valid html for the compiler to recognise the controls.

   

   Figure: ControlName is not declared

9. Run Code Auditor again. This time, enable ALL the rules and fix the errors reported.
10. Deploy to the web site.

See Code Auditor User Guide on ASP Migration from .Net 1.1 to .Net 2.0

Do you know how to generate maintenance pages?

In every application you focus on is the important business problems e.g. Invoices with multiple deliveries. Plus you have lots of lookup tables e.g. CustomerCategory. It is smart to work on the important business problems and have the lookup tables done automatically using a code generator.
The code generators to generate maintenance pages automatically, come from MS and from 3rd parties. The current choices are:

1. We recommend NetTiers (a template for Code Smith) in our 'The Best 3rd Party .NET Tools'. It is an open source template and the output code is of good quality. There are many amazing features:
   
   • Creates a full website project, already pre-configured and ready to begin coding against your data immediately.
   • Creates a full set of administration web controls, that serves as a basic yet fully functional web administration console for database.
   • Creates a full set of typed DataSource controls for your entire API with design time support, they are similar to the ObjectDataSource, only these are full featured and are actually developer friendly.
   • Creates a full webservice API for your domain, perfect for a .net winforms or smart client application and is simple to configure.
2. AspDB is an alternative choice. You can click via a code generator (Designer) to produce a complete and acceptable Web DB application in several minutes.
3. BLinQ is a tool to generate websites that use LinQ to show and edit data. DEAD - now replaced by ASP.NET Dynamic Data.
4. ASP.NET Dynamic Data provides the Web application scaffolding that enables you to build rich data-driven Web applications. This scaffolding is a mechanism that enhances the functionality of the existing ASP.NET framework by adding the ability to dynamically display pages based on the data model of the underlying database, without having to create pages manually.
   WARNING: ASP.NET Dynamic Data is in Beta and not installed on SEAL and SEALUS.

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.

1. Restart the website.
2. If step 1 doesn't work, try to recycle the application pool of the site.
3. If step 2 doesn't work, try to restart IIS.
4. 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).
5. 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.