14 Ways to Keep Your Catholic Web Site in Top Condition

Introduction

After basic web development, you can then take a step towards making your Catholic site perform better. This article lists 14 techniques to fully optimize a Catholic blog or web site. A site that is well optimized, validated, analyzed, and monitored will benefit many of its readers, subscribers, and searchers online looking for information on Catholicism and the Web. You may want to bookmark this page to guide you in improving the performance of your Catholic site.

Optimize: Gain speed through smaller file pages

After producing the basic web pages of your site, you can then optimize them regularly so that they will load faster in the browsers of your readers. The majority of those who use the Web expect speed. If your web pages are fast loading, they may obtain favorable responses from your visitors - especially those with dial-up connections. There is an optimum number for each element of an HTML page so that a site loads faster. To make your site lighter and load faster in browsers, you can check Web Site Optimization for a free speed analysis.

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 a .css file in your Catholic web site will lessen repetitive HTML tags like the font faces and font sizes, the link colors, and the size of the heading tags. This .css file will lighten the weight of all your web pages. To learn more about CSS, you can check A Beginner's Guide to CSS, and CSS Tutorials.

Optimize: Keep a few images on a web page

At the start, the majority of Catholic web site owners place many images on their web pages. It is natural preference since images, like those of the Blessed Virgin Mary, or the Eucharist, are one indication (aside from text on the Catholic faith) that can identify the page as Catholic. By putting many images, Catholic web site owners can learn how to encode images together with an anchor link to another page. But if you eventually want your web site to perform better in the search engine results pages, you have to place fewer images so that your web pages load faster. One or two images that weigh light would be best. If there is a need to present many images, then you can still make these images light through free image editors and optimizers that compress, resize, or convert the images to other image file formats. Two good resources are: GIF Optimizer and JPG Optimizer.

Optimize: Code your HTML page well and neatly

Usually, when you want to get things done fast, there is the possibility of forgetting to place a closing tag. So that all your web pages can load faster, it is important to be precise and neat with HTML coding. Usually, when nested tables are used often, they tend to slow down how a page loads in the browser. So it would be best to minimize the use of nested tables. Also, you can make it a point to review your code before uploading it through your FTP client. Otherwise, if the coding is rushed, and it is uploaded before it is edited well, much time would be expended since neglected parts of the HTML code won't make the page load well on the browser. Better to review and edit well all codes on a page before uploading it to your web host's server. If you need a tool for checking your HTML code, you may want to try HTML Tidy.

Validate: Always validate your web pages

For every web page produced in your Catholic web site, validation of the page is necessary. By validating the page, you get to know what other errors you have made in your HTML coding. These other errors can be broken links and empty anchor tags. A site that helps you validate your web pages is the free Web-based tools from the World Wide Web Consortium. This site 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: 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 by a visitor to your web site when he mistypes a url of your site. To remedy this situation for your site visitors, you can customize an 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. Your web hosting service can also be of help for this.

Validate the rss feed of your Catholic web site

If you make your Catholic web site as a site for information services, it would be a great advantage to create, maintain, ad update a rss feed in the site where others can subscribe to it. Once you have created the rss feed, you need to validate it regularly 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 your feed that does not follow the standards of the Web. It will also suggest how you can correct and remedy any format issue.

Monitor your Catholic web site with Google Webmaster Tools

With Google Webmaster Tools, you can monitor the performance of your Catholic web site. As you register the .xml sitemap of your Catholic web site, Google will present the following reports (among many others): statistics and diagnostics. With the diagnostics section, you can monitor your 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 your web site so that it will remain in peak condition. If you do this on a regular basis, you will achieve favorable results in the long term for your web site.

Monitor: Visit your Catholic web site on a regular basis

It may happen that your Catholic web site may be down for one or two reasons. You might get suddenly a HTTP 403 forbidden message on your browser, or an HTTP 503 message. These and many other HTTP error messages may at one time be given during the building stage of your site. It is good to learn the meaning of these error messages so that you can think and decide how to address the problem. Usually, all that is needed to resolve the error messages is to contact the customer support line of your web hosting service.

Monitoring: Lesser web pages leads to better management

A Catholic web site with a lot of web pages can bring more visitor traffic. However, in the long run, this will prove to be difficult to manage, control and monitor well. With too many pages, you might not be able to fix many web pages that will be hacked and web pages that are redirected to other web sites ("hijacked", by the addition of hidden code). To prevent this from happening in the near future, the best thing to do is to create a Catholic web site with enough pages to obtain visitor traffic, to serve its purpose and objective, and at the same time give ample control and management for monitoring well all the web pages. When you can monitor and control well all the pages of your site, it will be of great benefit in the long run.

Monitoring: Third party applications in a Catholic web site

Many third party applications can enhance a web site very well. However, too many can deliver counterproductive results, as it would be difficult to monitor all of them. It is for certain that some of these third party applications will work for only a short period of time. So, the best direction to take would be to choose only a few third party applications for your Catholic web site and then to note down in your records what web pages they are located in. In case something runs amiss, you can easily adjust the web page 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 you want to find out what really interests your web site visitors, then analyzing their behavior on your Catholic web site can really help. With Google Analytics, you can save time and resources (as an alternative to downloading web traffic analysis softwares and analyzing the log files of your Catholic web site). Google Analytics presents the following statistics for your 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 your site, is very valuable information. We get to know what visitors need from the site. In the Statistics section of Google Webmaster Tools, you can find out what these top search queries are. If you also registered the atom.xml url of your Blogger.com blog with the .xml sitemap of your Catholic web site, then you can get additional insights from analyzing how the statistics from both sites work together for optimum results. If you pay close attention to these statistics, you can improve and progress the quality of your Catholic web site and blog.

Analyze: Tweak your pages regularly for better SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Ranking

Once your Catholic web site has been published on the Web, you need to know which of your pages are specifically indexed by Google. To know this information, just place "site:www.yourdomain.net" in the Google search box, and click for the results. As you note down all of your site's pages that were indexed, you can then tweak (edit), or optimize the pages that were not indexed by Google. These web pages were probably not indexed because the content did not rank high in Google's algorithm for important key words and key phrases. Therefore, to make the web page perform better, you can first get the key word density of a page that was not indexed (through Ranks.Nl), and then after analyzing their report, just adjust all the elements of your HTML page with SEO (search engine optimization), 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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