Rules to Better Websites - Tuning and Maintenance

What brings customers back to your website time and time again? Fresh content. Keep your website up to date by creating and updating pages, which will drive customer interest.

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.

Google Analytics gives you a great insight into how, when and where your website is used. If you're not using an analytics package in your website, you're flying blind when it comes to understanding how, when and where your website is used.

You should design a website to look good when being viewed in Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, the latest version of Edge and Safari unless the client specifically requests otherwise.

There are a lot of other browsers available, but it is important to consider that most other browsers are based on the most used browser nowadays.

Websites can be complicated, and a very small mistake can take the whole site down. But there are two different kinds 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 the Health Check 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 Health Check test to prevent it from happening again. So next time, when the site is down or re-deployed to a new server, we can simply run the Health Check page and fix all red crosses then the site should be back online.

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.

Websites should have an uptime report to provide real-time and historical performance and availability information.

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 code hidden link with a query string at the bottom of the page that allows the link scanner to follow into the simulated user input. See the following code for example:

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: