Web Standards and Maintenance

November 13, 2003 | 4 Comments

It’s one thing to design and build a forward-thinking, valid, and Web standards based site. It’s quite another to keep that site forward-thinking, valid and Web standards based. It defeats the purpose entirely if you can’t maintain your site and keep it up to standards. Pardon the pun.

It takes work and lots of it. You might be in a position to do that work yourself, or you might have had to hand the site of to others. Either way, you need to prepare for the extra discipline that maintaining a valid Web standards based site needs.

I’m still learning what this entails myself, as I’ve just begun to have to work with a large and (almost) fully compliant standards based site on a day to day basis. Let me tell you, it’s not all it’s cracked up to be. At least not yet.

I do have a few pointers and tips:

• Validate on a regular basis. Run your as much of your site through the validator as regularly as possible. Checking your updates in the browser isn’t always enough. You’ll catch all sorts of little things. You might want to do as I’m going to do and make a regular schedule for validation checks.
• Beware cut & paste. Always double check anything you are cutting and pasting into your pages, regardless of how you serve content. This is where I’ve noticed the majority of validation errors cropping up.
• Create a list of “gotchas”. These are things that you may easily forget when coding pages. It’s easy to revert back to a non-standard way of coding by habit and a list, or better yet — a checklist, can help.
• Share common issues. Make sure that everyone involved with maintenance is aware of the possible errors that can creep in. Down at the hospital we’ve started a K-log to track the bits and pieces of standard XHTML.
• Train your content contributors. This is far easier said than done. If possible, provide cheat sheets and detailed instructions about ways validation errors can creep in. Double checking their work would be a good idea as well. After all, you can’t expect most content contributers to master this stuff overnight.
• If you are handing a site off, make sure you set up to succeed. This could be providing documentation, in as much detail necessary, what needs to be done to keep a site valid, or it could be a simple training session. Depending on who is taking over you could go many ways, just make sure everyone is on the same page.

Maintaining a standards based site takes discipline and may seem like an added load or hassle, but it has to be done. I’m sure once you get into the habit, it’ll become like second nature and the overall quality of you site will improve.

Filed under: Web General