Welcome to the October issue of the CyberArtisans monthly newsletter!

Our goal is to present information that will be useful to you as a web site owner. If these newsletters are not useful to you, please forward this to a friend who will find it useful.

Maintaining Your Own Web Site

Once you've got a web site, you'll want to keep it up to date. After all, one of the benefits the web developer sold you on was that, unlike paper brochures, web sites can be updated quickly and easily. That's nice, but how do you do it, how much time does it take, and what does it cost?

Once again, I'm going to have to give you the old cop-out – it depends. There are several ways to update a web site:

1. Send the updates to the web developer and have him/her do it
2. Buy some authoring software and do it yourself
3. Ask your web developer to set up a browser-based maintenance mechanism for your site

Let's look at each of these and examine the advantages and disadvantages of each.

Have Your Web Developer Do It

This is the easy way, and for many it's also the least expensive way. If your maintenance consists of an occasional change of a few items on a list or replacing an employee biography, write it up, email to the web developer, and forget it. Most small changes take an hour or less to implement, which means your web maintenance costs you maybe $100-200/month plus your time to write up the change.

Do It Yourself with Authoring Software

If you expect to make frequent and extensive changes – if, for example, you have a different sale every week and change the whole layout of several pages of the site – you might want to consider buying authoring software for your company. Purchasing the software isn't a big obstacle. Most can be had for $200 to $800. The big challenge is learning to use it, unless you get lucky and find someone in the company who already knows how to use one of the popular packages.

How easy is it to learn and use one of these packages? Well (here we go again), it depends. The two most popular choices are:

• Macromedia Dreamweaver – This is the choice of most professional web developers. It will do just about anything you want. Naturally, it is one of the most expensive ($400 - $800, depending on how many features you want). Of most concern for an occasional user, however, is the learning curve, which is quite steep. After using this software for several years, we are still experiencing Eureka moments when we find yet another trick it can do.
• Microsoft FrontPage – FrontPage is much less expensive (currently about $165 at CompUSA), considerably easier to use, and much more limited than Dreamweaver. However, if you have a web site that you like and just want to make changes to the content without mucking with the basic design, FrontPage is an excellent choice. Because Dreamweaver creates straight HTML pages, FrontPage can modify Dreamweaver pages without a problem. Note that the opposite is not necessarily true – FrontPage builds some web site components (forms, for example) using proprietary code that cannot be read by other authoring tools. This could complicate things if later on you want your web developer to modify that page.

  FrontPage also has the advantage of being relatively easy to learn and easy to use. Someone who is "fluent" in Word should be able to learn FrontPage fairly easily. But be sure to get some coaching from your web developer to make sure that your updates don't break anything on your web site.

Use Browser-Based Maintenance

Browser-based maintenance is a new and increasingly popular choice. There are a few tradeoffs, however. In general, this costs more up front (you have to pay for your web developer to buy or create the mechanism and put it into the web site) but saves you money on the updates over time. Obviously, this assumes you have lots of updates, or you wouldn't save enough to pay the upfront cost. So if you are expecting to do just a few updates a month, this option is not for you.

Note that this is not an all-or-nothing proposition. It's possible to design a fairly simple update mechanism for a simple page design. And you may only need to update a few pages of your site. Accepting certain limitations can make the update mechanism simpler (read less expensive).

Search Engine Optimization Revisited

A few months ago we discussed Search Engine Optimization (SEO) in detail. One thing we didn't emphasize is that some SEO schemes call for editing the text on the page or changing the look of the page to get better results from the search engines. These changes may make the page more likeable to the search engines but may also make the text less readable or the layout less attractive to human visitors.

Is there a tradeoff here also? You bet, but it comes down to a judgment call between you and your web designer. We recently found an interesting discussion of this issue in bizjournals.com. Please call if you'd like to discuss this further.

And if you are interested in discussing anything we've talked about in these newsletters, please contact us.

Thanks for joining us this month. Next month we'll look at using a database on your web site.

Jonathan Spencer
CyberArtisans Web Developers

http://www.cyberartisans.com/
617-965-4110