Web Site Maintenance

Home Customer Support Web Site Maintenance

Software for Maintaining Your Web Site

Many small web site owners can learn to update their web sites, provided they have the time and interest. Below are some of the tools that site owners have successfully used to work with standard HTML websites.

Another option for website self-maintenance is to begin with a website built on a Content Management System (CMS) such as Wordpress, Drupal, or Joomla. Read more about CMS websites here.

Multi-Purpose Tools

Adobe Contribute

For most web sites, Adobe Contribute is our recommendation for the best all-around web site maintenance tool. It combines impressive ease of use with flexibility. Contribute is cross platform and costs about $199 per user.

Contribute works best with sites designed with other Adobe products such as Adobe Dreamweaver, but it is not necessarily limited to these. If you are uncertain, contact support@webvalence.com for an assessment on whether Contribute would be an appropriate maintenance tool for your web site.

With Contribute, you do not need any separate software to upload or download files from servers, nor to resize and place images on your pages. If you download Contribute for a 30-day trial, contact support@webvalence.com and we will send an access key for your site.

More on Site Maintenance with Contribute

Other Web Site Authoring Maintenance Tools

Typical web site authoring programs, such as: Adobe Dreamweaver, Microsoft FrontPage and Linspire NVu are all designed to be more or less self-contained web site applications. These differ from Adobe Contribute in that they give you more control and more flexibility, but require more time and effort to learn.

Start With Stay With: As a general rule, you will find it easier to maintain a website if you use a similar tool to the one that was used to create your website. Some tools generate closed websites that need to be maintained with the same tool. The more extreme examples of this proprietary approach to web site construction are Apple iWeb and Microsoft Front Page.

Adobe Dreamweaver

Dreamweaver is our favorite WYSIWYG authoring tool. We use it for WebValence designed sites. It generates clean HTML and CSS code. Dreamweaver is a website authoring tool. We do not recommend it for the average Web Site owner because it requires too much effort to learn. Recognizing this limitation, Adobe has provided Contribute as the companion website owner's maintenance tool.

Apple iWeb

Apple iWeb has was conceived as a site authoring tool combining unparalleled ease-of-use with impressive artistic capabilities. Unfortunately, this was achieved by sacrificing interoperability with other authoring tools. Apple iWeb provides a closed authoring environment which is appropriate only for small owner-designed and maintained websites.

Microsoft Front Page

Long the mainstay of Microsoft's website authoring, Front Page is obolete and has been replaced by other tools. Front Page generates messy HTML and CSS which is difficult to maintain with other applications. We recommend Front Page only for websites that were originally built with Front Page.

Instructions on Dreamweaver, iWeb

If you choose one of these, you may not need additional software for uploading your pages, or for adding media such as graphics, audio and video. Web site authoring programs are usually not adequate for creating media, but they can be used to add existing media to a web site.

Single Purpose Tools

Options for Uploading Site Files (FTP)

File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is the traditional way to upload new web sites and implement changes to existing web sites. More recent standards include Secure FTP (SFTP) and Secure FTP (FTPS). We support:

• File Transfer Protocol - FTP
• Secure Shell File Transfer Protocol - SFTP
• FTP over SSL - FTPS

Web site maintainers may select their preferred access method in their web design or FTP application. In general, primary account holders (called "special" FTP accounts in cPanel) should use SFTP and users of additional FTP accounts will need to use FTPS. These additional accounts are usually generated for a designer or assistant in order to give access to a single site, rather than to all sites available in a customer's cPanel. To preserve security for all hosting customers, we support FTP in limited circumstances only. Contact support@webvalence.com for help.

Option 1: FTP Access using Single Purpose FTP Programs

There are numerous FTP application available for Windows, Mac OSX and Linux, both free and for a fee. We recommend obtaining an application that will allow FTPS.

If you need specific instructions on how to set up and use a FTP program, we recommend that you download a copy of the cross-platform application FileZilla and study the process in the following example.

Download the cross-platform FTP program FileZilla

Example: Connect via FTP using FileZilla

Option 2: File Transfer using File Manager in cPanel

Your cPanel includes a File Manager that can upload and download files through your web-browser.

Instructions on File Transfer using File Manger in cPanel

 

 

Acceptable Use Policy · Code of Ethics · Contact