Creating Research-Based Web Sites with Netscape Composer

Maintaining Your Site

Maintenance of your web site is critical in maintaining the credibility of the information you are presenting.  Over time, links to outside resources will become broken.  Information contained in your presentation may also change based on new research or developments.  It is important to make updates to your site as these things change.

If you have 20 pages in your site that have good, solid information, but have one page that contains links that don’t work or information that is out of date, this hurts the credibility of your entire site.

Maintenance is usually an easy task – simply check all the links from time to time.  For the research based web site you are creating in this class, once every month or two is a good interval to do this check.  If the invention you are presenting is more recent, you may have to read through the content as well and check it for accuracy on a similar timetable.  The content of sites for older inventions may only need to be reviewed on an annual basis.

Of course, you don’t have to do any maintenance if you have no interest in keeping your site useful – but it is a minimal investment of time to keep the site that you have worked very hard to create useful to others on the web.