Yes, a boring blog title.
Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been helping some photographers clean up and reorganize the “back end” of their web sites. Here are a few important things that every photographer should do with their web site (in no particular order):
• Change all usernames and passwords. A username of “admin” and a password of “1234567” are a disaster waiting to happen. Using the same combination of username and password for everything is foolish. Never, ever use the default username or password.
• Back up the web site regularly. Really. Keep a copy of the entire site on a local computer and/or on a CD/DVD. Most photographers’ web sites are not that large and can be easily backed up. Web hosts often provide a way to do site backups through cPanel (or similar). Or, just use FTP to download the site’s files.
• If the site hosts a blog or anything else that uses a database then back up the database. Again, web hosts provide a quick and easy way to do this through cPanel (or similar). It takes less than a minute to do. An alternative is to schedule auto-backups of the database using cPanel’s Cron feature. This usually requires only a single line of readily-available code.
Keep in mind that many web hosts stop doing site backups once a site gets larger than ~10GB or beyond a certain file count. They may still back up the site’s databases but they won’t do full site backups.
• Compress files to reduce page-load times. Depending on the web host, cPanel has an “Optimize Website” option or a “php.ini QuickConfig” tool to turn on compression. These do not (re)compress images or video but page-load times can still be made noticeably faster.
• If hosting a blog, use some sort of caching feature. There are plugins to do this. Also make sure the blog has various types of security in place.
• Use an .htaccess file to improve site security and control how folks access the site.
• Use a robots.txt file to control the various search bots that visit the site. Although, honouring a robots.txt file is just a “gentlemen’s agreement”. There’s no law that requires compliance.
• If there’s a coding problem on a site, the server will often produce an “error_log”. This is not done for fun. By reading an error log, a photographer might find out what’s wrong with their site and then they can fix the problem.
• Web site software is usually updated to fix bugs, enhance security and add new features. So keeping software up-to-date should be a no-brainer. Something like WordPress is quick and easy to update.
• Strongly consider search engine optimization. It doe$ work.
• Read your web site out loud. Seriously. Out loud. Fix the typos and grammar mistakes.
All the above are quick, easy and free to do and they work as advertised. What’s not to like?
