MMOB Classic - Web Site Maintenance Etiquette

Note: Minding My Own Business publishes at knowmybusiness.blogspot.com on Monday's and Wednesday's. While I am in the process of migrating fully to this new home, I will fill in non MMOB days with my blog entries previously posted on my MySpace blog page.

Problems with routine web site maintenance were brought to my attention twice over the past week by students, while I was working at Wichita State. I felt this was a relevant topic to discuss as nearly every business today has a web site.

I believe that there are 3 major issues that must be taken into account and are often not handled well by web designers and technology specialists in organizations.

1. Keep in mind upcoming events relevant to your business.

One problem brought to my attention was regarding access to our web registration site. Early each semester, students frequently utilize this site for adding or dropping classes from their schedules. Wichita State's tuition and fees office schedules deadlines for partial refunds of tuition payments. These deadlines are very tight and stringent for students, particularly those students who meet near the deadline to drop with a refund. Some of our WSU students had only two hours after their first class meeting to drop with a full refund. Unfortunately for these students, the university's routine scheduled maintenance was going on from the time the students' classes began until the deadline for the students to drop with a full refund. This prevented students from dropping their classes at the last minute and effectively changed the deadline from what students had been originally told. Fortunately, this problem did not impact many of our customers; however it reflected a lack of foresight, which can serve to damage the goodwill of the university.

In most businesses, there are peak times of consumer interest in their product lines (alcohol and greeting card industries are first in my mind) that they need to be mindful of when scheduling routine maintenance. Avoid website updates that will interrupt consumer access at all cost during these times.

2. Do not keep a regular schedule for site updates.

This seems counterproductive and contrarian to common sense regarding web updates. However, we do not know when our customers or potential future clients will access our company web site for information. As an example, another student was attempting to access a non-WSU managed web site for a university course assignment on a weekend morning, when technology support can sometimes be in short supply. The student was unable to complete his assignment because the site was down at the time. He mentioned that this was the time that he intended to be doing his homework during the week. However, the maintenance schedule for this particular web site is such that he must always alter his own schedule to accommodate the schedule of the company.

The business world no longer operates 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., Monday through Friday in an Internet age. Be aware that some of your clientele may only have limited after-hours to access your information. By rotating your routine down time and notifying customers in advance of website maintenance, you will maximize the likelihood that all your clients will be able to have access to your web presence at some point and will not always be inconvenienced when attempting to access your web page.

3. Consider using a mirror site during site updates.

While more expensive, utilizing a redirect off your main web site to a secondary site, while your main web site is under maintenance may be a viable alternative depending on the features that are being updated. For example, if a web site needs to update its storefront, but not the features that critical to the shopping process, it does not make sense to completely shut down the web page to make such a change to the site. In this case, a redirect to a secondary store might be adequate while the update to the main store is taking place. It takes much less effort to go to a competitor's web site to purchase a good than to wait for your site to become available again. In addition, by having a mirror site at the ready your company is able to move operations quickly to your mirror location, should your web site become compromised by hackers or web hosting problems.

Web site down time happens. How a company handles their down time and plans ahead for contingencies in the case of unexpected problems may be the difference between a sale or satisfied customer and lost revenue or at least lost goodwill for your company.

Minding My Own Business is a blog written by Augustine Iacopelli. This blog consists of a mix of general business observations and contrarian positions on relevant topics as well my own forays in the world of business and networking.