evaluation
Performance of the web site over the 8 week period
I am convinced that the web site has performed well. I believe it has done the following:
- Attracted and kept visitors engaged - the average length of session is over nine minutes which is quite remarkable considering the nature of the site. I would assert that it's due to the quality of the sites content, especially Ryan's blog which contains highly interesting articles.
- Sustained regular a 'hit' count of above four hundred over 8 weeks. I believe that this is due to the site being totally accessible throughout the time period and because I took steps to ensure the integrity of the entire at all times. Even during updates the site was flourishing.
- The web site template has remained stable even though new content has been regularly added. The web server's uptime was 100% over both months.
Improving the performance
At the moment, only the blog and the contact us XHTML pages are stored in a relational database and knit together with CSS using the server side programming language PHP. The content management system Textpattern controls this. That means that currently only these pages are indexed for searching.
The improvement that I would make next is create a content management system from scratch. Designing and building a totally be-spoke database driven website. This can be achieved by bringing together PHP and MySQL techniques and technologies. Once implemented, all the textual content will be formatted and submitted into a relational database. Making use of normalization I would avoid duplicating data, saving web space and bandwidth.
Using MySQL to store all our data allows the web manager to perform backups of, and manage access to the information. Even if the server crashes and the database becomes damaged, there are tools avaliable to repair broken tables built in to the database management system itself.
It is my opinion that this would definitely improve the functionality and performance of the site. For example, in a few years (or maybe even less time than that) the company will probably be rebranded and will want the web site remade too. If all the content is stored in normalized form, the XHTML structure itself can actually be changed. At the moment, we are able to update the presentation site wide through the use of CSS alone, but we are restricted to stay using the <div>'s already defined in the XHTML documents.
My performance
My strengths
My weaknesses
Areas for improvement
Click next to continue...