Site Maintenance

Site maintenance is an important part of any webmaster’s duties and has to be taken seriously, but it is not usually an onerous task.

However, in the last thirty days or so, two of the largest players on the Internet, Google and Amazon have decided to force everyone to make huge alterations to their web sites

If you make any money from the Internet, the chances are that these changes will affect you.

Google says that most people now access the Internet from mobile devices with small screens or will do soon, so they are going to give priority to websites which are ‘small-screen friendly’.

While it is perfectly feasible to have a menu of twelve or fifteen buttons taking you to different sections of the site, a mobile screen can’t really accommodate more than two or three.

Therefore, to make a large site mobile friendly, you would need to drill down through many, many more menu options. That is tedious and means the downloading of many more menus and so the use of much more bandwidth.

I wouldn’t be happy with that, but I suppose it must be easier than scrolling right and left and up and down all the time, but then why use a small screen for this type of work/pleasure? However, what bothers me is the site maintenance involved. If it is not your profession it will take a lot of thought and much more work.

Why? Because a private company has decided that that is the way they want to see websites so that they can make more money on the public Internet.

I have forty websites to redesign and maintain. Thanks Google, thanks a lot!

Then Amazon stuck its oar in. They have been doing their own site maintenance and decided to rename two of the root directories that deal with books and their sales (I only sell books, it probably affects all the items on its website).

There is no automatic fix for renaming all the links to products on their websites, but they will tell you where their software has found links that will need to be changed. There are about two thousand of them on 197 URL’s on the forty websites.

At ten minutes a link, the site maintenance to make me Amazon-friendly is going to cost me 20,000 minutes or 333 hours, which is a month at ten hours a day with no days off and the old links will expire on July 15th.

Today is June 16th, so even if I start my enforced site maintenance right now, I will not finish in time. Who do these people think they are? However, it does make one thing very, very clear: they don’t give a toss about the small entrepreneur.

Google and Amazon are firmly on the side of big businesses like themselves who have entire departments to deal with their site maintenance.

All the best, I’d better get on with my site maintenance, how about you?

Owen

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Podcast: Site Maintenance