As I’m sure you’re aware, you can’t just set your website up, leave it alone, and expect it to be as successful as you like. A good website needs to be updated frequently and well-managed to achieve the business goals it was created for in the first place. If you’ve found your past websites a little tough to run, here are some tips that will make managing your next one a breeze…
Credit: Max Pixel
Avoid Static HTML Pages
If any modern web designer suggests using static HTML pages, then they’ve got a lot of catching up to do! At one time, constructing all your pages in Dreamweaver and similar programs was a perfectly reasonable way to build a website, but now we’re out of the dark ages and well into the renaissance. The first thing you can do to ensure your site is nice and easy to manage is to find a good CMS. The one you choose will have a huge impact on how easy it is to update and run the site in the future, so make sure it has handy features like a clean separation of content, the ability to edit while looking at the site itself, rather than having to go back to the control panel, and the ability to support whatever content structure you need.
Move to the Cloud 
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If you’ve been using conventional, static hosting services for your website in recent years, then you’ve been cheating yourself out of a much easier ride! If you’ve never used cloud computing before, then charging into a totally new piece of tech can seem a little intimidating. However, once you’ve stumbled through the initial difficulties, there are a range of benefits to using cloud hosting services. You’ll shave down your loading times considerably, make your important data safer through automatic mirroring, and most of all, simplify the task of managing your website. Most good cloud hosting companies give you access to simple and user-friendly interfaces which will allow you to check on the state of your website at a glance. Moving from traditional solutions to the cloud can take a bit of effort and organization, but once you’ve done it, you’ll be kicking yourself for not making the jump sooner!
Use Structured Content as Much as Possible
When you neglect structured content, you’ll just be placing text, images and other media on a page. The content will then live there, and there’ll be no easy way to use it anywhere else. This may feel natural, but it’s certainly not the best way to compose content for a website. On an unstructured page, it’s up to you or your designer to provide all the markup. It makes professionalism and consistency much harder to achieve in the first place, and even harder to maintain and manage. Structured content, on the other hand, will simplify the process of adding new features or removing existing ones, and will also give all the pages on a site much more consistency. You’ll also find it easier to reuse information on feeds, apps and so on.
