Website maintenance best practices - PowerPoint Presentation

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Website maintenance best practices

CMS User Group Meeting

October 21, 2015

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Why maintenance?

You spent a lot of time and effort building your website, you don’t want to let it languish

Your website is a powerful tool to communicate with your audience

It’s not that hard (with a little bit of planning)

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What does maintenance involve?

Checking and fixing broken links

Reviewing and pruning content

Refreshing your entire website

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Broken links are bad

They damage your reputation

They frustrate users

They negatively affect search rankings

You’re pissing off other web folks

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Broken link checkup

Nobody likes fixing broken links

If you budget a little time each week, it’s not so bad (promise)

Blink has over 3800 pages-Dan spends about 2-3 hours/week fixing links

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CWS, I’m motivated to fix broken links! Now what do I do?

Check publish messages

Check individual pages for broken links

Use the CMS broken link report

Run Xenu or Integrity

Ask us for help!

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1. Check your publishing messages

After publishing go to the dashboard and check publishing messages:

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Message detail

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Scroll down to the good stuff

Why is this broken?

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2. Check individual pages for broken links

Finds

links on the Add-One & Tools page:

http://cws.ucsd.edu/support/documentation/working/cms-features/add-ons.html

Download Link Checker Firefox

Plugin or

Check My Links Chrome

Plugin

Check

for broken links after you publish

Manually check critical/high traffic pages periodically

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3. Use the CMS broken link report

You must be a site manager to view the report

Edit pages directly from report

Note: it’s a little limited-no way to exclude links

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CWS needs to eat our own dogfood

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4. Run Xenu or Integrity

Finds links on the Add-One & Tools page:

http://cws.ucsd.edu/support/documentation/working/cms-features/add-ons.html

Download Xenu (PCs) or Integrity (Macs)

Run the report

Watch the magic happen

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5. Seriously, what do we have to do?

Run broken link checker for you

Send you the report

Public shaming?

Kudos from us?

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Serhiy is your new best friend

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Here’s the meat

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What about redirects?

Um, what is a redirect?

Wikipedia

: URL redirection, also called URL forwarding, is a World Wide Web technique for making a web page available under more than one URL address. When a web browser attempts to open a URL that has been redirected, a page with a different URL is opened

.

Redirects can be at the server level or via an .

htaccess

file

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.htaccess

examples

Redirect

/student-life/_organizations/student-conduct/

http://

students.ucsd.edu/sponsor/student-conduct/

Redirect

/academics/classes-enrollment/undergraduate-enrollment/checklist.html

http://students.ucsd.edu/academics/enroll/undergraduate-enrollment/checklist.html

Redirect

/academics/enroll/graduate-enrollment/enrollment-checklist.html

http://students.ucsd.edu/academics/enroll/graduate-enrollment/checklist.html

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Why you can’t rely on redirects

Temporary fix at best

A redirect of a redirect of a redirect will eventually break

Not good for performance

Messes up search rankings

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What to do about it?

Link checkers will show you redirects

You should fix them

If you don’t, you REALLY should check for broken links often

If you don’t have time to check your entire site, check most important pages

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Content review is important

Your website needs pruning

Less really IS more

Users will visit your site more if you change it often

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Your website is kinda like your closet

Shouldn’t it look nice and tidy?

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My ideal closet

I like shoes

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My actual closet

Still like shoes

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Is this sexist?

Number of shoes per team member:

Allisa – 45

Alex - 5

Chris – 6

Cristian – 10

Dan - 5

Jessica – 13

Jeremy – 30-40

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Even nerds can get behind this

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The most important rule

If you put something on the website, take something down

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CMS review feature

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Schedule a review date

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Annoy your co-workers

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Don’t forget about images and files

Images get old, too:

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Review your downloadable files

Is this form still current?

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Editorial calendar

Want to keep your home page fresh? Set up an editorial calendar

Add recurring events, programs, news items

Use a Google/shared calendar or another collaborative tool (SharePoint, OneDrive, Google doc)

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Editorial calendar sample

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Site refresh

Go bug Chris

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Questions?