(Shelly Cashman Series) Gary B. Shelly, H. Albert Napier, Ollie N. Rivers-Web design_ introductory concepts and techniques -Cengage Learning (2008)

202 Chapter 7 Promoting and Maintaining a Web Site
• Include a mechanism for gathering user feedback and act on that feedback. Visitors’
suggestions and criticisms can help you improve your Web site.
• Evaluate and implement new technologies to further your site’s objectives and
increase its accessibility and usability.
• Retest site features periodically.
Although some WYSIWYG editors include the capability to update pages residing
on the live server, generally, it is recommended that you avoid this practice. Updating live
pages carries the risk that your audience will see incomplete or undesired changes. Follow
these steps for maintaining and updating your Web site:
1. Download the desired Web page from the Web server to your computer, if
necessary, to work with the most current version of the page.
2. Update the Web page.
3. Open the Web page in a browser and check the changes and the page display.
4. If the changes and the page display are acceptable, then upload the updated page
to the server, replacing the existing page.
Evaluating Web Site Performance
At the heart of your original design plan are your site’s primary and secondary goals
and the objectives necessary to accomplish those goals, as stated in your site’s purpose statement.
After publishing your site, you must then begin the ongoing process of evaluating your
site’s performance toward achieving its stated goals and purpose. Evaluating the performance
of a simple personal or topical site with one or two goals should not be too difficult. In most
cases, getting feedback from family, friends, classmates, and other members of the site’s target
audience is sufficient to ensure that the site is accomplishing its goals and purpose.
Web site performance evaluation becomes much more complicated for large, complex
organizational or commercial sites with multiple goals and broadly defined purposes.
Typically, these types of sites follow a formal evaluation plan that, in addition to ongoing
testing and visitor feedback, might include benchmarking, Web server log transaction
analysis, and a review of other performance measures, often by third-party marketing
professionals.
BENCHMARKING A benchmark is a measurement standard with which actual
performance can be compared. For example, a benchmark for an organizational or
e-commerce site might be to increase the number of visitors by 10 percent per month
over the next 12 months. Comparing the benchmark with the actual growth in the
number of site visitors each month can help a site’s owner determine what, if any, changes
should be made at the site. A performance benchmark is not static; after evaluation against
actual performance, a benchmark might need to be adjusted to make it more realistic.
WEB SERVER LOG ANALYSIS In Chapter 2, you learned that each time a browser
requests a Web page from a Web server, that request for a page is recorded in the server’s
transaction log. Web server log transactions provide a wealth of information, such as the
following:
• The requesting computer’s IP address
• The browser making the request
• The date and time of the request
• The URL of a referring link (the link the visitor clicked to jump to the site’s page)
• The path a visitor takes from page to page through a Web site