Site Management
View tools in the Site Management category
Intended purpose:
This broadly-inclusive category can contain everything from free text editors to comprehensive suites of tools costing many thousands of dollars. All these tools share the characteristic of being used for constructing and maintaining web sites.
Potential for remote management:
These tools usually have the capability of changing the content and structure of sites. To function properly, they must be used in an environment where they have permission to make changes. Hence, their use on remote sites is limited.
Why do we care?
We believe that site-management tools can help web-site developers and managers to use best practices. We hope there is a correlation between sites that use site-management tools and sites we can consider low-risk.
Characteristics?
These tools are designed to be used for building and maintaining sites. They sometimes check for problems like bad syntax, broken links, and orphan pages. Some can move pages, directories, and whole sites from one computer to another, rewriting links as needed. They often provide help with the syntax of important web standards, particularly HTML and CSS. Some of these tools integrate with databases to accommodate the development of dynamic web sites.
Relationship to other categories:
Web site management, as a category, can include any tool that has the functionality
seen in any of the categories. Some single-purpose tools are actually claimed
by their makers to be web site management tools; those claims are true. For
our purposes, though, we are considering as web site management tools only
those that have many of the functions in the different categories, along with
the capabilities for editing files and managing directory structures.
High or Low impact:
For the functions that use crawling technology--checking links and site mapping,
for example--the impact on sites can be high, depending on how frequently
the tool makes its requests. For the functions that make changes on your own
sites--editing, mostly--the impact is high in another dimension, that of content,
rather than bandwidth. Synchronizing the pages between a work space and a
production area is is very high impact operation, usually changing many files
and uploading them rapidly. On most sites, though, the high bandwidth and
processor demand last only a few seconds. Large sites can take longer.
Can these tools be used on other sites or only on your own site?
Only on sites you have permission to change.
