In the past posts, we have talked about what type of tools can help you out when you create a website. But there’s something else you’re going to have to think about, and this is called website maintenance. This can be a lot of work, but there’s several things you can do to help out. More info after the break!

Why you need to maintain your website:

No matter what type of website you are running, you are going to have to clean it up some day. Your website can be messy internally. This means your database or even the scripts you use can be inefficient when it comes to accessing them. The folder structure of your website can be the messiest thing in the world. Let’s say your working on a test project for your website, and there’s several files you need to put on your server. You should create a folder like “Testing” or something like that where you are able to put all your projects in. You don’t want to smack all of your files in the root directory (public_html or www; this is the main folder where your website sits on); it would get messy quickly. Your website will run slower if your scripts and even your database are messy and not cleaned up correctly.

How do you do all of this:

There’s a lot of things you could do. But we’re going to start off with the basics.

1) Clean up your source code (PHP, HTML, and CSS for example)

This might sound funny, but your scripts can slow down your website. The biggest thing is how fast the script can execute. If your script is running slowly, you might want to change your coding.

Another thing you can do is delete your blank chars (spaces before the code executed) and also your blank paragraphs. This might sound surprising, but it actually saves you some used space; in return, gives you faster loading times.

And you can try to lay up on your comments you have in your code. PHP does have to skip those comments. In other languages like C++ for example, when you compile your program, your comments are already stripped out from the program. In PHP and all types of scripts, this is not the case. So try to lay down on your internal comments. And yes, this does apply to CSS and HTML too!

Notepad++ can help you out…

2) Clean up your folder structure:

If you have a lot of folders, you might want to clean some of those up. Not for the case of slowing anything down, but mainly because it makes accessing your server via FTP or any other file transfer protocol easier.

3) Make sure your database (like MySQL) is clean:

What I mean by as clean might confuse people. But your database can get huge if you have a site that has a lot of content. Your database is like a hard drive, it can get fragmented, which slows it down in return. But there’s an easy way to fix this. All you need to do is log into PHPMyAdmin (a software that manages your database), and click on a database/table that you think needs fixed up.  First, click on a database you want to fix up. Then with the check boxes or the “Check All” at the bottom, select the tables you want to fix up. Then at the bottom of the page, you should see a drop-down box where it says “With selected:”. Click “Optimize table” and then you should be able to go. If your database is in bad shape, you can also click “Repair table”, which will try to fix corruption issues.

You can also create scripts to handle this. Remember, Google is your friend. You can search for “optimize MySQL database PHP”, and I bet you’ll find something!

4) Backup your site:

This is the most important part! If anything crashes or corrupts, you could be lost a couple of files. You should always backup your database no matter what! You don’t always have to backup your files (unless if your content is stored in those PHP/HTML/CSS files), but it would be a good thing to think about. Personally, I backup my database every week, and I backup all my files every month. This is all managed by scripts. And about every 5 months or so, I store the backup on a terabyte hard drive I have. You always want to be safe.

A search with “backup files database PHP” on Google can help!

I hope some of these tips for cleaning and maintaining your website will help you out!

– Content Management Systems (CMS) –
A CMS is a type of software that can run on your server that can help you create your whole website. A great example of this is a piece of software called WordPress (read below to find out more). You can find that most blogs run on some type of software like WordPress. It basically helps you manage your site and keep your content organized. Although not all the time… All of the CMS’s we have here support plugins, modifications, and of course templates! Now, all of these CMS’s listed do not mean you can get away from HTML, PHP, CSS, and much more.

Here’s a list of some CMS’s:

• WordPress

WordPress is one of the popular CMS’s out there. It’s used for a lot of different cases, but one of the main features people love WordPress for is it’s blogging feature. With WordPress, you’re able to set up a blog easily! It can do other things, but some other CMS’s are easier to use and can do more than WordPress. Themes are extremely easy to find, and will not be any problem! With WordPress, you can have a blog up and running very quickly!

• Drupal

Drupal is a great CMS. It’s one of the CMS’s that’s easy to use and easy to modify. But it’s not one of the CMS’s we would recommend because it’s a bit more complicated to use. Drupal for sure is one of the fastest CMS’s out there when you have caching and GZIP on, which makes your website take up less bandwidth and also render a lot faster. Themes can be limited, but you could always create one yourself.

• Joomla

Joomla is one of the CMS’s that we can not say how much we love it. It’s one of the easiest to use CMS’s out there! You can install plugins, modules, templates to the system extremely easily from it’s backend. It’s very stable and is also one of the best for theming! It has so many themes that your choices will blow you away! It’s something we would recommend if you are a starter, professinal, or anything else. It supports all of the masses out there! You can for sure get a website done fast with Joomla.

• Mambo

Mambo is actually very familiar to Joomla, because Joomla is based off Mambo. Like Joomla, it’s very fast, sleek, and easy to use. A lot of people use Mambo, even businesses.

• PHP-Nuke

PHP-Nuke is for a different type of CMS. In PHP-Nuke, you can change the site to anything you’ll like and also add new features to it too!

• TYPO3

TYPO3 is for sure a CMS that is great for high use, for example, a business website that recieves many veiwers a day. It can be used for both a blog and  CMS. It’s light-weight too!

- Newsletters -
When having a business, small business, or even a personal website, sometimes you would like to send out a news letter. Yes, there’s software that can run on top of your CMS, but it would be great to have external software, and that’s what we are going to talk about today. You really need to just see what you like best. There are other mailing systems, but these are the best in our opinion.

• PHPList

PHPList is for sure one lovely newsletter system. It’s easy to use, and man, it for sure has a lot of features. You can easily link it to a form on your CMS, and let it handle all the work for you!

• Mailman

Mailman is for sure easy to use. It’s better for managing discussions than PHPList, but PHPList does have losts of features in it. Mailman is different, so you should just try it to see if you like it.

There’s some peices of software that can help you out! If you would like anything added to it, please let us know with our contact form!

Then over the years, I started to like web design even more. So I said to myself, “I want to learn more about web design”. What did I do? I created one of my first websites, TJasko.com, which is not used that much for anything today.

With TJasko.com, I was able to learn a lot of things; not developing skills, more along the lines of being a webmaster. I was able to learn how to keep a website running smoothly. Then after a while, I became the webmaster of several websites. After with all the experience I had, after learning CSS, HTML, PHP, XHTML, SQL, and many more, I’m was able to create one of my first major website; the website you are on right now, TechCores.com.

While I was learning all of this, no one was helping me. Even if I wanted help, I didn’t get much. I learned a lot of my skills just by messing around (which is always recommended to learn something new) and using my resources like the internet.

What I did have was a mast directory to help me find the things I need, source code. Yes, that’s right, for about 1 year, all I did was examin people’s source code to see how the website works. I learned so much by doing this, I was able to start writing my own code.

But the thing is, there’s really no easy way to share all of this information with the world. You do have directories which have a lot of information about creating a website, but nothing really that’s easy to follow along.

So that’s what Tech Cores will be helping you with. For however long it takes us, we will break web design and all the webmastering skill one by one in a simple guide of different blog posts or parts. This will help us focus on one topic every day and help you learn something too. Every single day (unless if it’s a major holiday or something important) there will be a new part about website design or webmastering. And when we’re all done, we’ll compile all this information, and put it in one big “how-to” guide!

So fasten your seat bealts, and gear up for the knowledge of becoming a great website designer and webmaster! More to come soon!