You may be forgiven for thinking that your shiny new website is now done and dusted, and that you simply need to keep it filled up with new products in order for it to keep going forever. Well, it will certainly go for some time like this, but what you really need to do is keep on top of maintenance chores right from the start, in order to keep your site uncluttered, efficient, and neat. Doing this will make working with your site a far more pleasant and efficient process as time goes by. But what are the actual goals of a maintenance plan?
Fundamentally, your maintenance-based goals must relate to the fact that you want to keep your store as up to date and relevant for your customers as possible. A secondary requirement of your maintenance plan is to keep the site well-ordered behind the scenes so that the administration process is kept effective and efficient. From this we can derive a kind of three-pronged attack on the system's entropy, which can be summed up with the following...