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Website maintenance best practices
CMS User Group Meeting
October 21, 2015
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)
What does maintenance involve?
• Checking and fixing broken links
• Reviewing and pruning content
• Refreshing your entire website
Broken links are bad
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They damage your reputation
They frustrate users
They negatively affect search rankings
You’re pissing off other web folks
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
CWS, I’m motivated to fix broken links! Now what do I
do?
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Check publish messages
Check individual pages for broken links
Use the CMS broken link report
Run Xenu or Integrity
Ask us for help!
1. Check your publishing messages
• After publishing go to the dashboard and check
publishing messages:
Message detail
Scroll down to the good stuff
• Why is this broken?
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
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
CWS needs to eat our own dogfood
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
5. Seriously, what do we have to do?
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Run broken link checker for you
Send you the report
Public shaming?
Kudos from us?
Serhiy is your new best friend
Here’s the meat
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
.htaccess examples
• Redirect /student-life/_organizations/student-conduct/
http://students.ucsd.edu/sponsor/student-conduct/
• Redirect /academics/classes-enrollment/undergraduateenrollment/checklist.html
http://students.ucsd.edu/academics/enroll/undergraduateenrollment/checklist.html
• Redirect /academics/enroll/graduate-enrollment/enrollmentchecklist.html http://students.ucsd.edu/academics/enroll/graduateenrollment/checklist.html
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
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
Content review is important
• Your website needs pruning
• Less really IS more
• Users will visit your site more if you change it often
Your website is kinda like your closet
• Shouldn’t it
look nice and
tidy?
My ideal closet
• I like shoes
My actual closet
• Still like shoes
Is this sexist?
Number of shoes per team member:
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Allisa – 45
Alex - 5
Chris – 6
Cristian – 10
Dan - 5
Jessica – 13
Jeremy – 30-40
Even nerds can get behind this
The most important rule
• If you put something on
the website, take
something down
CMS review feature
Schedule a review date
Annoy your co-workers
Don’t forget about images and files
• Images get old, too:
Review your downloadable files
• Is this form still current?
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)
Editorial calendar sample
Site refresh
• Go bug Chris
Questions?