I’ve been cruising the web this morning looking at several of our competitors. There’s a huge variety of them. I knew that, of course, but I’ve been on vacation for a couple of weeks and the diversity stands out very clearly when you look at a lot of companies during a short period of time.

This exploration got me thinking: what kind of problem is website maintenance anyway?

Well, except for very busy sites, one that it’s very definitely not is a networking problem. A few of the competitors I’ve seen are more break and repair PC service types. That’s a very different field. Operating in it as well as website design and maintenance is probably a recipe for failure. Maybe that’s too harsh; maybe it’s more just not a natural recipe for success.

So, what is it?

At its most basic, website design and maintenance is a communication problem. You have some thing or service or idea and you want someone else to understand what it is and how it applies to them. This takes clearly written text, clean and relevant images and a layout that presents the information in appropriately digestible chunks.

One level up from that, website design and maintenance is a marketing problem. In order to communicate clearly, you need to know who you’re talking to and what is important to them. If you’re trying to sell them something, you need to know what your audience’s buying triggers are likely to be. And, even if you do all of this right, you need to make sure you website is known and generally findable by your target audience.

On a separate level, website design and maintenance is a software problem. Your site will go through versions, include a variety of custom and stock code that make up the bells and whistles and you’ll need to keep up with the security of the whole thing.

I’ve often said that website design and maintenance isn’t rocket science. And I still believe that. But it is increasingly complex. Even the simplest sites use databases and dynamic code. And, since everyone and their brother has a website, it’s getting harder and harder to stand from the crowd.

As a website maintenance consumer, your challenge is to either a) have all of these skills in house or b) find a partner who you trust to be good at enough of them that you’ll excel. The first is near impossible to do while also handling your core competency. The second is extraordinarily time consuming.

As a website maintenance provider, our challenge is to keep up with a broad array of trends and skills so that we can help our customers shape and implement their website strategy. This means we have to improve, continuously, our skills related to communication, marketing and software development. We do this through practice, exploration, training seminars and an ongoing conversation with a wide variety of customers.

It’s a lot of work, but it’s also a lot of fun.

One of the many frustrations of operating a website is that stuff you don’t necessarily want people to find is often still available in one cache or another.  Google operates one of these.  So here’s the question:  how do you delete data from the Google cache?

Simple: instead of just deleting the page, delete most — not all — of the content on it.  Let the Google bot come around and index the new, empty content.  Once you have verified that Google has cached the empty content, you can safely delete the page.

That’s it!