Maintanence

A list of some of the different maintanence tasks required to run a web site.

Backing up your data

Most hosting companies backup your data regularly but I like to periodically save my own web files to my home computer because I don't want my data files and the backup of my data files to be in the same place (although some sites do have off-site backup). This also give you more control over your files. If we are just talking about backing up only your regular files then you can just log onto your FTP program and drag them into a folder on your computer.

One story detailing the potential risk of having all your data in one physical is from a popular website named somethingawful.com. Something Awful's servers were located in Louisiana when Hurricane Katrina hit. Something Awful's hosting company worked hard to keep the site online, but eventually had to shut it down. After a brief time offline, the site was returned to a "semi-functional" mode and today is back to normal.

If you are someone who is just starting to put a site up, I don't think you need a master plan for backing up your site. But once your site starts to grow and becomes more successful the cost of such a catastrophic event goes up. This cost is especially high for sites that rely on forum traffic. If you have a web site with static pages then you can fix the problem by just replacing those pages with backups you made months ago but the forum content constantly has new contenet added so you must have a recent backup made and have quick access to that backup. Also, a forum's value is based on the volume of posts so having your forum posts get erased an then putting an empty forum back up doesn't solve the problem.

Security

Making sure your website is secure is an issue most webmasters deal with only in a crisis situation. But there are things you can do to plug some well-known holes in your site. For one, make sure your webstats are password protected. One of the biggest sources of security issues are the holes in public scripts like VBulletin, phpBB, or various content management systems. When hackees find holes in these scripts they do Google searches to seek out as many forums to hit as they can. No-name scripts don't get as much bad press but this idn't because it wont have holes, it just means you haven't heard about them because the scripts are not popular.

Another source of security issues are publicly-accessible webstats. Hackers have been known to be able to crack your site though there. Another thing to watch are holes created by writing bad PHP code - especially when it comes to forms and file upload scripts. PHP is a powerful coding language because it can do so many things but this can work against you sometimes. In general, the interactive your site is, the more likely it will get hacked because "interactive" means your site is allowing data to be transfered from outside users into your site. This is what allows hackers in.

Scan for Copies of Your Site

Periodically, you will want to scan the Internet for copies of your site. If you have the kind of site that has some very popular and originial content then I would select a group of 5 to 10 words from one of your pages and cut and paste into Google in quotes and search the internet for it. If you discover someone has stolen your content, you need to then decide how to appoach it. There are three ways you can approach it - you can play hardball, be nice, or just let it go. The consensus attitude about this issue seems to be to contact the webmaster and ask them nicely to take it down. Then if they refuse you can start to play hard ball.

Be Nice. Look for contact info on the site and email them asking nicely asking for the material to be removed. You should also use a Whois lookup to find out the website owner's name, address, e-mail, and telephone number and record the information in case you need the information in the future.
If they refuse your requests you can contact their web host and tell them that their customer is using copyrighted content. Provide links to their pages and yours.
Send a formal 'Cease and Desist' letter notifying them that they must remove the stolen content from their site. Some sample letters are available on the web.
File a notice of Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) infringement with Google and other search engines to have the site removed from their database and search results.
If you need proof that they copied your site, you can go to archive.org to show that your content appeared on their site your site after it appeared on yours. You could also possibly print up the website and get it notarized - although I don't know if notaries would do this.

There will be times that the offending site will refuse your requests even if you start to mention lawyers. At that point you need to sit down and think about what your next move will be. You need to make an honest assesement of the damage to your site. How much sales are you losing? What damage to your brand has there been? A couple of things to consider here are how much money your site makes and how strong of a brand do you have? If your site makes $500 per year it is hard to convince people that a lot of tangible damage is done. Most webmasters are not going to suffer financial damage because most web sites are not making money so getting a lawyer may not be worth the cost.

Similarly, if you have a great site but the offending site is a crappy imitation site that you can tell gets no traffic then there won't be much damage either. Cheap sites that are obvious amatuer ripoffs won't do much damage. There are always going to be 14-year-old kids who cut and paste your page into their Geocities page. Sometimes, other than e-mailing Geocities, these pages aren't even worth the time (unless there is a reason to worry about a Google duplicate content penalty).

I'm not trying to minimize the issue of copied content. I understand the value of intellectual property and the legality of copyright laws. I'm not arguing what is right and wrong. I'm simply pointing out that as a webmaster you have to ask yourself "Has this person actually hurt my traffic, profits, image, brand, or reputation in any TANGIBLE way"? Then you need to think about what it is going to cost you and decide if it is worth it.

Most webmasters' decisions in this area are purely emotional. Picture this: you find a site that has copied some of your content. You look it up in Alexa and see it doesn't even have a ranking. You lookup their Whois information and send them and e-mail asking them to take it down. No answer. You wait a week. You send another. No answer. After another week you send a more harshly-worded letter. Finally, you get an e-mail back from the site that says "Go fuck yourself". What do you do? Most webmasters have that reflexive reaction to go on the offensive and get a lawyer and show people who is the boss. After all, you are right and they are wrong. But it isn't that simple. Taking someone to court is expensive and the cost may be worth more than the benefit. Not to mention the person may be across the country or in a different country. If the offending site is crappy do you really want to pay a lawyer $300 per hour to take down a site that might get 3 visitors a day?

Many times when you go on SitePoint and see people asking other webmasters what to do in this situation every loves to take the tough talk route but how many of these webmasters have actually done it in that situation? If getting a lawyer or going to court is the best decision to make then go for it - just make sure you are doing it for sound business reasons and not to satisfy your ego.

Here are some resources to help you with the issue of copied content:

	plagium.com - Checks for copied content. This is a manual tool which should be used on an as-needed basis. It uses text snippets and is very quick, efficient, and free.
	copyscape.com - copied content checker. This tool is an automated tool which scans URLs and can also notify you if it finds something (although this may be a permium service). If you want to scan some text at a particular time then I would recommend using Plagium.com.
	webmasterlabor - Checks for copied content. You can compare by using text, an uploaded file, or URL but the ads and mechanics of the web site as a pain in the ass.
not rated	DMCAnotice.com - send DMCA notices.

Re-design

You will be doing a re-design every couple of years. I guarantee this. I guarantee this even if you are the world's best webmaster because the asthetics of the web is always improving. So don't spend forever trying to get that perfect design. Think of making a web page the same as buying a house. As time goes by you will make small improvements to your site (just like you go to Home Depot to do small improves your house). Examples of this would be changing the footer, changing some text to do mouseovers, doing imageswaps on the menu, or other stuff. As the site gets older you will want a completely new design - just like you would eventually stop doing marginal improvements on a house and just buy a better house. A redesign will be the equivalent of buying a new house - your old house just wasn't made to meet your new needs. Alot of times you will see companies like Wal-Mart, Walgreens, McDonalds change the interior of their stores every 5-10 years. This isn't nessesarily done to increase sales. Sometimes it is done just to keep up with the times. Website upgrades aren't nessarily done to increase the number of visitors, it is done mostly to increase the quality the visitors' experience.

Checking for dead links

Every now and then you need to check for dead links on your site. If you have a decent-sized site then this can't be done manually. There are a few free online tools on the web that can do this but they are almost always limited to small sites or give partial results because they want you to pay for the full version. The software below (Xenu) is a free program you can download and install on your PC which can check tons of links and gives back tons of useful info. If you have a big site then it may still take awhile. I had a site with 8,000 links and it took 30 minutes to check it but you can let the program run in the background or you can run it and take off and come back later.

	Xenu's Link Sleuth
not rated	webmaster-toolkit.com - dead link checker

Web Surfing

You should spend at least 1 day a month looking at different Internet sites to learn new things. These could mean reading various webmaster forums, SEO forums, script sites, or sites that have hacks for your forum. They could also be design sites which show you better ways to design like the CSS gallery sites. Or it could simply mean surfing the web and just looking at random sites for nice domain names, nice layouts or designs, or new business ideas. This is one of the most valuable ways you can spend your time and I think many successful webmasters end up "accidently" surfing the web during their less-busy periods not realizing how much it helps them. But I don't think there are many webmasters who actually make a deliberate effort to allocate time to just surf the web but this is something webmasters should schedule into their routine. Make sure you aren't using surfing as an excuse for laziness by not doing the more important things that are on your to-do list.

Web Surfing Links

	del.icio.us - "webmaster"
	del.icio.us - "webdesign"
	del.icio.us - "SEO"
	del.icio.us - "css"
	del.icio.us - "web graphics"
	Alexa - Movers & Shakers (english sites)
	50.lycos.com - Lycos 50 most popular weekly search terms
	buzz.yahoo.com - Yahoo Search - Top Movers