How to tell if your website is broken (and how to fix it)

Posted by TimSlavin at May 10, 2003

See how many of these questions you can answer about your website:

Where is your website hosted?
What do you pay per month for webhosting?
Can you change content on your website easily (within minutes)? Or do you need designers and/or programmers?
Do you have a written plan that defines audience(s), goals, budget(s), and resources for your internet projects? If so, when was the last time you read this document?
When was the last time you saw a report on activity for your website and other internet projects? Can you call up the report(s) in your web browser?

If the answers to one or more of these questions are negative, chances are your website is broken and in need of repair. Of course these are basic questions. There are many more.

However, clear documented goals (even a one page document) plus the ability to maintain content easily plus the ability to gauge the impact of content changes, these are the three key indicators of the health of your internet projects. Other issues, such as webhosting costs, are important but apply mostly to small businesses that do not have the luxury of an in-house IT department.

Here are the most common fixes for each of the questions above:

1. Where is your website hosted?

Believe it or not, this is a common situation. Many small businesses have bought a website from someone and left it alone. If you don't know where you website is hosted, chances are your site is on auto-pilot or you have trusted someone else with this information. In either case, if you don't know your webhosting service, and what capabilities they offer, you will be hard pressed to take advantage of the next question.

2. What do you pay per month for webhosting?

Webhosting costs have become a commodity in the past three or four years. With careful selection, you can buy lots of email accounts, subdomains, autoresponders, and other useful capabilities for $10-$25 a month USD. You can find these webhosting services either directly with a webhosting company or through a graphic design or programming shop that rent their own webservers to host sites for their clients. The best companies do not treat webhosting as a profit center, offering little functionality for lots of money.

If you contact a webhosting service directly, you need to speak to their customers to ensure that your requirements are met. Linkstream.net and HostingMatters.com are two low cost webhosting vendors that offer excellent capabilities. There are others, of course. The best way to find low cost webhosting is to ask people you trust for their experiences and recommendations. Online services that vet webhosting services, and recommendations in magazines, should be considered carefully. You cannot check all of their motivations, for example, whether or not webhosting vendors pay to be rated. It also is likely that you will be left with several choices to evaluate: the same situation that results when you ask people you trust.

Whether you arrange your hosting directly or through a design or programming shop, confirm that tech support is swift (under 1 hour in most cases), that there is an online forum to post questions (and read answers from others with similar problems, a great way to prevent support calls in the first place), that uptime is 99% plus, and that througput is significant (the site appears quickly in your browser). Most companies need at least 50 email addresses, 5-10 autoresponders (e.g., sending email to sales@yourcompany.com automatically sends a reply confirmation email), 5-10 subdomains (e.g., support.yourcompany.com), 100 MB of storage space, a control panel to manage their capabilities (e.g., CPanel), and website activity tools (e.g., Webalizer and/or AWStats).

You also should look for a webhosting vendor that bundles in a suite of open source tools, for example, shopping carts, website activity software, and chat. A standard tool set constrains their support costs compared to letting their customers install any tool.

One point to consider with webhosting: the difference between email support and telephone support. In my experience, there is little difference in response time between these two types of support. A telephone rep can be as clueless as a rep with an email account. There is, however, a huge cost difference. That cost difference is passed on to customers. Much telephone support also is for new users who require lots of hand holding. If written well, email support can be printed out and pored over step by step. Email support also leaves a content trail that good webhosting services will reuse to create FAQs or newsgroup postings that their customers can use for additional support. If you want to pay for a small segment of the customer base, insist on telephone support. But most people will find email support more than adequate.

Finally, this advice applies to businesses that have low to moderate volume websites. If you do significant ecommerce or have a high volume website, chances are you either have in-house design and IT groups or contract with outside companies. You probably were able to answer this question.

3. Can you change content on your website easily (within minutes)? Or do you need designers and/or programmers?

The ability to change content quickly is key to making your website a useful part of your business. For one thing, when you first set up your website, you can only make educated guesses about what content will appeal to your audience and what link text works best. Therefore, it is important to have software (either through a web browser or on your computer) that connects to your webserver and lets you edit pages. Designers and programmers are important, certainly, but they should not be a choke point.

If you do not know the process by which content can be changed on your website, or you have to pay for a designer or programmer to make every change, then your website might as well be broken. You can use FrontPage or Macromedia Contribute to make changes to your website. However, if the result is static html pages, chances are your graphics and links are hard-coded into every page of your website. That poses a problem if your site is more than twenty pages (or so) and you expect to change your web page design every year or two. (From a software programming perspective, having the same graphics and links code "baked into" every page of your website increases the risk that one or more pages will have that data change without your knowledge.)

Beyond FrontPage and Contribute, there are a number of low cost software tools to manage your content. Weblog software from MoveableType, pMachine, or Radio Userland might work. Or you might want to look at City Desk or csPublisher. These tools allow you to create and edit content with a web browser. The price, however, is slightly more complexity. You (or your designer or programmer) will need to configure roughly 4-6 variables (not a real problem) and you will need a database.

You also might need to formally sit down and define your requirements for a publishing tool if your website content is maintained by several people or you want to reuse content currently used by their customer representatives and sales teams. While Contribute has the ability to prevent multiple authors from editing the same website file, it does not include an approval process that lets an author notify an editor that content needs to be approved.

In a perfect world, your website graphics and links should be separate from your content so that graphics and links can be maintained in a single set of files. You should be able to change both, certainly, but at the least you should be able to change your content and links. For a small business with a low to moderate volume website, hiring a programmer or designer to set up your site with Contribute (to let you edit content) and include files (to keep your graphics and links in as few files as possible) is probably the best approach because Contribute is a first rate easy to use authoring tool.

4. Do you have a written plan that defines audience(s), goals, budget(s), and resources for your internet projects? If so, when was the last time you read this document?

The easiest solution to this problem is to write a plan. However, writing a plan can become complicated. That is why most people are afraid of any serious documentation.

So start by at least jotting down the overall process by which your company finds, sells, supports, and upsells your customers. What are the different steps involved in these four processes? What customer staff and your staff are involved in each step? What information, tools, and functions are used in each step (e.g., telephone, email)?

Then jot down all the different kinds of customers you have and assess their value to your company. Don't assume that customers who pay the most are the most valuable. They're not if they consum lots of resources to sell and support them. Be creative in how you define the value of customers to your business. Think beyond the obvious costs, revenues, and referrals.

Next, consider how your competitors define their processes and customers. Adjust your thinking as needed.

With these two sets of information (process and customer segments), look at the process by which you find, sell, support, and upsell only your most valuable customers. Now is the time to ask how and where a website, email newsletter, online survey, or newsgroup might be useful in your overall process. Websites make great brochures but they are far more valuable if they're used to reduce phone calls. Surveys and newsgroups could be valuable ways to poll your best customers for their experience of your company as well as their needs. And email newsletters might be a useful way to follow up at key points in your sales process.

However, you might find the internet is barely useful. It might be more helpful to visit your customers and see how they use your products in real life, in their offices and shop floors. I assume that you do that already, of course. In these cases, the internet might only be useful as a reference tool that supports a few parts of the process you use to find, sell, support, and upsell customers.

Once you have an ideal process for your ideal customer segment(s) that includes internet projects, the next step is to figure out how to market your internet projects to maximize their value within your process. For example, simple things like a uniform email signature file for employees (sales staff, at least) might help in addition to the obvious plastering your URL on every brochure and collateral.

This is the minimum that any business should do to plan their internet projects. However, it is better to engage key staff and customers in a more extended process that covers the same territory. For example, your best customers might tell you that part of your sales process is a royal pain, or that there is another better and cheaper way to support their needs. You will miss those nuances if you sit in a bar and jot notes on the back of a napkin. You really need a company vision statement, a business plan, project plans for each internet project, and a marketing plan. And you need to review these documents every six months with your staff and customers to update them based on experience.

5. When was the last time you saw a report on activity for your website and other internet projects? Can you call up the report(s) in your web browser?

While webhosting has become a commodity, website activity reports are still in the dark ages. You can pay from free to thousands of dollars and still be left with mountains of data. So where do you begin to understand how visitors use your website?

Begin with the content that your best customers need from your website (or email newsletter or newsgroup). Make sure that content is thorough, well written, and highly accessible from your home page and elsewhere. Then look in your website activity reports (and/or clickthrough reports for email newsletters) to determine how often that content is found over time.

You can help this process a bit by placing content in carefully grouped folders. For example, you can place your content into folders that are unique and, as a result, show up in your website URL as yourcompany.com/topicA. Webalizer and other activity software will show you which folders are accessed most often.

Free website activity software has limits, however. Activity for a specific page or folder includes all visits including those from search engines and other bots (e.g., software that crawls the web to collect email addresses for spamming purposes). You are left to count up and deduct this activity from your counts. AWStats, an open source activity software tool, allows you to configure the tool to exclude some activity from your reports but not every tool is configurable.

If free website activity software is not enough, you have options that cost in the hundreds of dollars. The software resides on your computer, in most cases, and processes website log files that you collect on your computer. WebTrends is one of the original commercial software packages. However, NetTracker, LiveStats, and Urchin offer capabilities equal or better than WebTrends. With all three packages, you will need to search (or filter data) based on individual data points, for example, a specific web page (all activity to that page), search terms, visitor IP address, or other criteria. While more expensive, these tools show you how specific visitors navigate through your website. That's critical information if you need or want to change content or link text and measure your results over time.

Whatever tool you choose, all your website activity reporting should focus on content that your best customers need as part of the process you use to find, sell, support, and upsell them (see question 4 above). Counting hits is a waste of time, not least because one page with three graphics will count as four hits. Unique visitors, page views, and time per session will give you a general idea of whether your visitors are engaged with your website, whether they're grazing and reading content (high page views and time per session) or thrashing (high page views and low time per session). (Thrashing, however, can be good if visitors find their information and move on.) For email newsletters, open rates, clickthroughs for links in your email, and bounce rates are the key metrics to use.

One other website activity must-do: work with your webhosting vendor to collect your website activity and error logs on a daily basis. Then store these files in a safe place with regular backups. You may need them in the future, for example, to track usage over time. It is okay to assume you will never need your old log files. But what if you're wrong tomorrow?

Bottomline, whether your website works or is broken, the internet can be a powerful business tool if you learn the basics plus enough to know when to hire professionals to help, here and there.

Resources Mentioned In This Article

Linkstream.net
HostingMatters.com
FrontPage
Macromedia Contribute
MoveableType
pMachine
Userland Radio
City Desk
csPublisher
AWStats
WebTrends
NetTracker
LiveStats
Urchin

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