 14 Ways to Keep Your Catholic Web Site in Top Condition
Introduction
After learning all the methods of
basic web development for your Catholic web site, there more ways to make
the site perform better, and maintain its peak condition. This article lists
down 14 ways to help fully optimize a Catholic web site - so it can serve
well its readers, subscribers, and the internet public at large. You
may want to bookmark this page as a guide for suggested tools and
resources, and to regularly do the steps suggested for the upkeep of your
site.
Optimize: Gain speed through smaller file pages
After producing web pages, we can then optimize them so that they
will load faster in the browser. Fast loading will get favorable
responses from our web site visitors - especially those with dial-up
connections. There is an optimum number for each element of an
HTML page so that our Catholic web site loads faster. A web site
that can help us with a free speed analysis is:
Web Site Optimization.
Optimize: Use external CSS in your Catholic web site
External CSS (cascading style sheets) are .css files which format
the elements of the entire HTML page. Creating such a file in your
Catholic web site will help lessen repetitive HTML tags in all
of your web pages: especially the font faces and sizes, the link
colors, and the size of the heading tags. This .css file can lighten
up all the web pages of our Catholic web site. To learn about CSS,
you can check
A Beginner's
Guide to CSS, and
CSS Tutorials.
Optimize: Keep images on a page to a minimum
Many of us Catholic web site owners are very fond of placing images
on our web pages. It is an expected preference because an image, such
as one on the Blessed Virgin Mary, or the Eucharist, is one of the
identifying marks that can identify the page as Catholic. However,
placing too many images will not help the web page load faster. One
or two images that weigh light would be best. If your Catholic web site
however wants to present many images, there are many free image editors
and optimizers that can compress, resize, or convert the images to various
formats. Two good resources are:
GIF Optimizer and
JPG Optimizer.
Optimize: Make your HTML code well formed and clean
In our desire to get things done fast, we often forget to close our
tags or create unnecessary attributes. In order for all our pages
to load faster, we need to clean up our HTML code. Whenever it can
be avoided, let us not use nested tables to avoid slowing down the
page. We can also remove the extraneous markup inserted by Microsoft
Word when we save a file as a web page. This will make our Catholic
web site obtain a favorable response from our site visitors. There
is a free tool that we can use to clean up the many problems mentioned
above:
HTML Tidy.
Validate: Always validate your web pages
As we produce the web pages in our Catholic web site, we must always
validate each page that is produced. This way, we will get to know
what errors we have in our HTML coding - errors like broken links and
empty anchor tags. One place to look for in validating our web pages,
is the free Web-based tools from the World Wide Web Consortium - the
organization that defines and maintains Web standards.
Their W3C
Link Checker lets you specify a URL, and then recursively checks all
your links in the web page.
Validation tip: Set up a custom error page for your Catholic web site
Many web hosting services can allow you to customize a custom error page
- the HTTP 404 not found error page. These error page is usually
encountered when a visitor of your web site mistypes a url of the site.
To remedy this, we can make our Catholic web site
contain a customized error page with a search box and other
related links. There are many free tutorials on the Web on how
to make a HTTP 404 not found error page.
Validate the rss feed of your Catholic web site
For a Catholic web site that is mainly in operation for information
services, it is an advantage to create, maintain, and update a rss
feed so that others can subscribe easily. Once we have created
the rss feed, we need to validate it so that it will follow the
standards of the Web for rss feed formats. A good feed validator
is
Feed Validator for Atom and RSS. This validator will report
whatever elements in our feed does not follow the standards
of the Web. It will also suggest how we can correct and remedy
any format issue.
Monitor your Catholic web site with Google Webmaster Tools
With Google Webmaster Tools,
we can monitor many aspects of our
Catholic web site. As we register the .xml sitemap of our
Catholic blog and web site, Google will present the following
reports (among many others): statistics and diagnostics.
With the diagnostics section, we can monitor our Catholic web site
for any errors: in the .xml sitemaps, for urls not found, for
HTTP errors, for unreachable urls, and many more. It is very
important to monitor all the aspects of our web site so that it
will remain in peak condition. If we do this on a regular basis,
we will certainly achieve a favorable response from our web site
visitors.
Monitor: Visit your Catholic web site on a regular basis
It may happen that our Catholic web site may be down for one or two
reasons.
We may get suddenly a HTTP 403 forbidden message on our browser,
or an HTTP 503 message. These and many other HTTP error messages
may at one time be given during the building stage of our Catholic web
site. It is good to learn what these error messages are so that
we can think and decide how to address the problem. Usually,
we only need to contact the customer support line of our web
hosting service in order to get our Catholic web site online
again.
Monitoring: Lesser web pages leads to better management
My previous Catholic web site had far too many web pages. It grew
to a number that made it difficult to manage, control and monitor well.
Because of this, some of my web pages were hacked, and some were redirected
to other web sites ("hijacked", by the addition of code on my web pages
without my knowledge). Because of this experience, the best thing to do
is to create a Catholic web site which has enough pages to serve its
purpose and objective, and at the same time give ample control and
management in monitoring well all the web pages. When we can monitor
well, our Catholic web site can achieve top condition.
Monitoring: Third party applications in a Catholic web site
As with my experience of many web pages, many third party applications
on a Catholic web site can deliver the same counterproductive results.
It would be difficult to monitor them, especially if they are many
and do not work anymore. So, the best direction would be to
choose only a few third party applications and to note down in your
records what web pages they are located on. In case something runs amiss,
we can easily adjust by either removing the third party application
completely, or by substituting it with another that serves the
same purpose.
Analyze your Catholic web site with Google Analytics
If we want to find out what really interests our web site visitors,
then analyzing their behavior on our Catholic web site can really help.
With
Google Analytics, we can save time and resources (as an alternative
to downloading web traffic analysis softwares and analyzing the log
files of our Catholic web site). Google Analytics presents the
following statistics for our site:
- visits
- pageviews
- ave. time on site
- new visits
- pages most visited
- traffic sources
- direct traffic
- referring sites
- search engines
Analyze your top search queries
Knowing what search queries visitors are using in the search engines
to enter our site, is very valuable information. We get to know
what they want from our Catholic web site. In the Statistics section
of Google Webmaster Tools, we can find out what these top search
queries are. If we also registered the atom.xml url of our Blogger.com
blog with the .xml sitemap of our Catholic web site, then we can get
additional insights from analyzing how the statistics from both sites
can work together for optimum results. If we pay close attention
to these statistics, we can improve and progress the quality
of our Catholic web site and blog.
Analyze: Tweak your pages regularly for better SEO Ranking
Once our Catholic web site has been published on the Web, we need
to know which of our pages are specifically indexed by Google.
To know this information, we just place "site:www.yourdomain.net"
in the Google search box, and click for the results. As we note
down all of our site's pages that were indexed, we can then tweak,
or optimize the pages that were not indexed. We can first get
the key word density of a page that was not indexed (through
Ranks.Nl), and then after
analyzing their report, we can adjust all the elements of our
HTML page with SEO, so that our page gets indexed with a good
SEO ranking.
Related sources
-
PC Magazine, May 6, 2003 edition, "Web Site Tune-Up", by John
Clyman
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Dennis Emmanuel Cabrera
Web Developer Methods for Catholics
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