The fjblog

The Ultimate Guide to Maintaining Your Website

Having a website: It's a responsibility. While modern content management systems make it easy to manage your website, they also require ongoing maintenance to keep them secure and performant. Website Maintenance is the ongoing process that will keep it up-to-date, secure, and loading fast. 

You're responsible for a website - as well as 54 other things on a daily basis. You may have heard of our Website Maintenance Plan, but are wondering how it can help you on a daily basis? We've broken out some common scenarios below:

Another week, another major announcement by Google that will make analysts everywhere happy. Google just announced support for Calculated Metrics in Google Analytics, which will allow you (if you are using Universal Analytics, which you should be at this point...) to create new reporting metrics that are derived from other metrics. 

This last Sunday, Google made an announcement that shocked the online advertising world. After many months of wondering by advertisers, publishers, and businesses, Google announced their "Customer Match" feature in AdWords. This feature allows you to directly target your current customers by allowing you to upload your email list to AdWords, and use that to create an Audience to market to. 

Content Management Systems are one of the easiest ways to build and manage your website. Deciding on a Content Management System is anything but. With options from Drupal to Magento to WordPress, each with their benefits and issues, deciding which CMS is right for your site can be a massive task. However, breaking that down into key questions will help narrow the playing field and make your decision easier. 

WordPress is one of the largest Content Management System frameworks on the Internet, powering 24% of the web. While WordPress is an extremely easy to use CMS, it is important to keep it properly maintained. This is the best way to ensure your site stays fast, secure, and delivering value for your business. Website maintenance for WordPress can be a daunting task, but here at fjorge we have some tips to make it easier:

One of the current bigger issues in the Digital Strategy industry is that of Referrer Spam in Google Analytics. This refers to spammers spoofing a website's Google Analytics property ID, and using it to create fake referral views from spam domains, in an effort to gain exposure for their site. It causes numbers to differ from reality, creates spam entries in the data that have to be dealt with, and generally causes the Analytics account to be less useful. 

One of the most important parts of launching a website is the project management plan. This plan will guide the site, from the first meeting through launch day. Creating the website project management plan will also cause the project team to think through the entirety of the site, ensuring a smooth build and launch process.

Launching a new website is a complicated task. Website launches, from small/medium businesses up to Healthcare.gov, run into issues every single day. The issues range from the technical to the human, and the issues at website launch are never the same twice. We here at fjorge have put together some of the top tips to avoid these website launch pitfalls: