Making website administration easy

Managing a website can suck up a lot of time - especially for individuals and small organizations who may already be multi-tasking.

An average day might see an individual spending valuable time, making backups (or ensuring backups are made), adding FAQs, checking logs, moderating comments, approving and managing new content and so on.

With a bit of effort, you should be able to gear a website to help make everything a little easier.

Let's go through a few important features of any good website and discuss how they can be combined into strategic times savers:

Permissions

It's critical that you are able to present or hide feaures and functionality based on who is viewing the site. As the owner/administrator, nothing should be beyond your grasp. Using permissions you should be able to set up additional functionality to allow creation of content on the fly.

For example, if you are responding to support requests, it would be useful to be able to create a FAQ by instantly copying and pasting your response into a form on your page (perhaps in the sidebar of the site). This form can be made to be visible only to you. Having this conveniently available saves you from constantly navigating away to a new FAQ creation page, or having to open several tabs and hop between them.

Specialist functionality

Implicit in the above point is the ability to create specialist functionality (like a FAQ creation form in a sidebar). Your web platform should make it a breeze to add, configure and remove features like this without requiring programming or major work.

Specialist functionality doesn't stop at FAQ creation pages. As the administrator, you may wish to be notified of new comments or content instead of having to periodically check up for them. Your web platform should be able to apply actions (such as sending the administrator an email) based on virtually any type of trigger (such as a user posting a new comment for moderation). Again, you should be able to accomplish this without resorting to programming.

Automation

This is one of the biggest time savers you can implement and there are a surprising number of web operations that can be automated. A few examples are:

• Assigning roles or permissions to users who care an account, apply for new permissions, or purchase new products - based on certain preset criteria. For example, you could give a user access to premium content on the condition that their subscription payment is confirmed by PayPal (or whoever handles your ecommerce transactions) - no need to waste time manually inspecting this.
• Database backups are a prime candidate for automation. Your platform should allow you to set regular backup times and maintain a set number of older backups. If, for example, your site is fairly busy, you might wish to backup every half hour and keep a hundred backups available (two days worth). At any given time you have two days worth of data stored and up-to-date within the half hour - all without lifting a finger.
• Something people don't often think about, but performance is also best handled automatically. Your website should know when it is under high load and make allowances for it. An example might be throttling back on cpu intensive functionality, or increasing the cache time for certain pages. Saves you from constantly having to monitor the site's load.

The above examples serve as a demonstration, but the sky's the limit when it comes to making life easier. It can take a bit of thought before you realize "Hey, why should I keep having to do this, or visit that page all the time". Whatever you decide on, your web platform should have a wide range of features that make it easy to implement those changes. If not, I'll say it again - move to a powerful, professional platform such as Drupal or Site prebuilder.