Regular auditing and web maintenance is vital to building and maintaining trust with your visitors. Learn about how to prioritize content updates as well as the quality assurance and workflow tools that can help streamline the process.
Maintaining your digital presence
Your website is the most public-facing reflection of your department and is an extension of the larger Yale brand. A visually appealing, easy-to-navigate website with up-to-date content builds influence and trust with your visitors.
Unlike print publications, website content production is continuous. It is typically represented as a content life cycle that includes four phases: planning, creation, maintenance, and unpublishing.
During a rebuild or redesign, there’s a lot of energy directed toward planning and adding content to the site. But you can also benefit from strategically pruning low-value content over time.
Committing to a regular audit and maintenance schedule can help you avoid large-scale efforts that require a considerable time and resource investment.
Prioritizing content updates
Developing a maintenance plan must begin with identifying priority content. After you have identified this content, you can build a schedule around updates and reviews, with a rhythm that ranges from daily to annually.
Refer to your Content Audit and Content Matrix, where you recorded the pages with time-sensitive content that need to be updated on a periodic basis.
Use quality assurance tools
Good web maintenance can be time consuming and overwhelming, especially for large or complex sites. Quality assurance tools can help reduce the time and effort required to keep your website up-to-date and free of functionality and accessibility issues. Two recommended tools are Siteimprove and the Hemingway Editor.
Siteimprove is a Yale-provided tool that will monitor your site, flag issues and help remediate issues including quality assurance, SEO, and accessibility. Siteimprove also has a powerful analytics tool that generates insights and data that can be used to create a better user experience for website visitors.
The Hemingway Editor is a free, easy-to-use tool that helps you improve and simplify your website’s text. It analyzes style and word choice for text grade-level, color-codes suggested edits, and provides statistics on text (word count, paragraphs, etc.).
Developing workflows
Build your workflows around clearly defined roles and responsibilities. Roles and responsibilities include defining who does the following for each webpage: Typical roles include:
- Writes content
- Subject matter expert
- Reviews content
- Approves content
- Publishes content
Often these roles overlap, or they may be carried out by the same person. Use a workflow document to record who maintains the website and who to contact for changes.
Once you’ve defined roles and responsibilities, you can use Drupal’s Workbench Moderation module to reinforce that workflow system in the editor interface.
Make a plan
Regardless of the size of your audits and maintenance plans, always ask:
- How well is the content working for our users and organization?
- What are the challenges, risks, and opportunities?