Category:User experience -> UX strategy -> Maintenance

Plan and implement website monitoring and maintenance

Web analytics

Before you’re able to measure the effect of improvements to your web content and related internal processes, you must define measurable objectives for what you want these improvements to achieve.

Reach
Conversion
Acquisition
Retention

Start with what you know from as high up on the food chain as possible. Is this year’s organizational focus on growth? Stability? Internal process improvement? Innovation? Diversification? All of the above?

Push to assign hard numbers to outcomes clearly tied to your content and process improvement efforts.

Make sure you have clearly defined data points about what you know, how you know it, and where you’d like to see change occur, and by how much.

Try to set expectations that measuring changes to key performance indicators (KPIs) is necessary to get a full picture of how future content improvements actually affect those KPIs.

Claire O’Brien at Content Delivery & Analysis has developed an indispensible Content Usefulness Toolkit (CUT).

Measuring the impact of your content strategy against your organization’s KPIs is the only way you’ll ever build a business case for continual, ever-increasing investment in your web content.

Consider using Google Analytics
Consider using Google Feedburner

Audit analysis—Assess/plan content

Site assessment or content plan set against insight benchmarks.

Provides statistics on RSS feed usage
Takes basic feed from your site and optimises to give it the best chance of displaying accurately across RSS reader software.

Maintenance

Content must be maintained over time with regard to accuracy, consistency, timeliness, and relevance. This is accomplished by establishing a maintenance plan.

Google Webmaster Tools

Create a sitemap.xml file

A sitemap is a list of all page URLs on your site. Placing an XML sitemap file in the root of your site enables search engine crawlers to find out what pages are present and which have recently changed, and to crawl your site accordingly.
If your site has less than 500 pages, use xml-sitemaps.com to generate a compliant sitemap file for you to download.
For sites with more than 500 pages, you may have to pay to generate a sitemap XML file using a web-based service.
For WordPress sites, Arne Brachhold made the Google XML Sitemaps Generator plugin which does all the work for you. The plugin updates your sitemap file automatically when you update your site.