1: I agree that backing up your site is a must an if a web hosting company offers that service it could be worth spending the extra money in case something would happen to your site. I wanted to discuss the idea of hiring someone to maintain your site. When you are talking about a site that you have developed do you agree with that statement? I know that people make a living maintaining sites, but if I was a business owner I would feel more comfortable having the developer maintain and make improvements. When you have a third party taking over how you may have to spend more time making sure that they understand what you want from your site. Just some thoughts
2: I think that this author made some great points. I think that many people that have a website think that the hard part is putting the site together. I think that after reading this article, the most work is going to come after the site is up. There is a lot of work to design a great website, but when you read the article you have to have a plan to make sure that the site can maintain its effectiveness. The five steps did not surprise me because we have talked about all of them but this article sets forth the plan for maintenance when all the work is done. If you don't follow this plan, all of your initial work could be for nothing. My favorite point is about measuring and improving. In the world of technology, things can change in a matter of minutes. Therefore, you need to make sure that you are evaluating the site to keep up with your competitors and technology.
3: I really enjoyed this article, it gave out a lot of helpful information and it was interesting. It was a very good argument because the author compared the importance of maintenance to real life situations, which made me really understand the importance of maintenance. It makes sense, because I know time after time I get tired of eating the same thing everyday, and the same thing goes for online presence. If your site isn't interesting and it has the same content all of the time then eventually your customers will get tired of it. Fresh content is important. Your website speed is important also because I can remember several times when I visited some sites and it took them almost forever to load. Those sites that I visited that took almost forever to download was never visited again by me, and I would hate for my visitors to experience the same thing as I did. It wasn't anything in this article that surprised me, because I already knew everything that was written in the article, but it was fun to read.
4: You was talking about speed when it comes to a website. One thing I have noticed with speed on a website is it can also depend on who you use as your search engine. I know that some times I can not get the ecampus site to down load and it will set there and spin, spin, spin. I usually have to go into my history on Google and clear it out in order to get logged into to school. When I would use Safari it would actually kick me out of class or even lock up. When I spoke with IT they said that some times it is the search engine that is causing the problem. I was told Safari was not a good one to use for school and to try another one. I wonder how many people have the same issues, but decide it's the website and just leave
5: I agree with you on almost everything Kelly. You make a perfect point about it being pointless to set everything up if you are going to "forget about" updating your website. The money you can lose because of an oversight like that is ridiculous. However, I do not think you need to set up a focus group to get feedback. All you have to do is add an area for people to give feedback on your website. You hit it right on the head, people on the Internet love to give their opinions on things and they are brutally honest when they do not have to talk face to face. That means an on line message will be much more honest because they don't have to deal with hurting someones feelings in person. You made a good point about getting feedback, but I do not think you need to go so far to get it when you can keep up with it from the site itself.