In the Maintenance section:
Maintenance
Technical Aspects
How Do I Maintain The Technical Aspects Of My eGovernment Website?
A website needs regular technical maintenance in order to remain a useful tool for the user. Technical faults not only may prevent you and your users from achieving your respective communication goals, but they may ultimately lead to a loss in the image and reputation of your organisation, especially as the web spreads wider and users become more sophisticated and demanding.
As much as it may seem obvious, the first thing you should check is that your site is actually regularly online . Servers sometimes stop working, and unless your site is highly interactive or has very high traffic (both likely to lead to rapid enquiries from users in case the site is unreachable), it may take a while before you realise that the site is actually offline (or "down"), unless you check it regularly. Setting it as the default homepage in your browser can help this process. It is also possible to run software that regularly checks the activity of your servers and alerts you to any problems that may arise.
Then, you should make sure that the site's interactive features and mechanisms are regularly tested, and that any problems they may suffer are fixed as quickly as possible. This includes:
- Checking the links between the documents you host, and between these and any external web pages they link to; it is possible to automate this process using specific link-checking software which will scan through the site and identify any malfunctioning (or "broken " ) links, providing you with a report that will help you fix the problems.
- If you have implemented specific accessibility features in your website (e.g. providing alternative navigational mechanisms for disabled people), you should check that these are applied consistently and on a regular basis throughout the site; it is common to overlook these aspects after the first phase of implementation of a site, especially if work is rushed and you need to publish things quickly: therefore, it is important that you run regular reviews of contents using accessibility software (e.g. screenreaders), especially on new documents or sections of your website.
- Other interactive features such as web forms, online database query systems and other enquiry and response mechanisms should also be tested regularly, to make sure they function properly, especially if they serve the purpose of supporting partial or full transactions between users and your organisation, which may in fact be among the primary goals of your project.
Testing should ideally be carried out on a variety of platforms, both old and new. When new pieces of software or hardware are available, it would be good practice to test the site also with them, so as to make sure that it complies with the latest standards in web communication. At the same time, you should make sure that changes in the functionality of a website are also supported for users of less than recent technology.
Finally, it is always a good idea to regularly make copies (or "backups") of the data that constitutes your website, so that if the computer on which it is normally stored fails or crashes and it becomes unworkable, you will not lose all the data and will be able to restore the site as soon as possible, on another machine.