Comments on: Controlling the website animal

By: Jessica Franken

Jessica Franken — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 17:18:00 +0000

“Webpages that has not been update” …?

By: Robin

Robin — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 11:11:17 +0000

For chopping down the number of pages on a huge website, perhaps the threshold for challenging the existence of a page could be where it is ranked in the complete list of pages?

That way, a web manager can work out many pages his team of editors can reasonably keep tabs on, and regularly challenge any pages which fall below this threshold.

In theory, this should keep the amount of pages to a manageable level. It can be written into a policy as well: "The web team has the capacity to maintain around 2,000 pages. This means the any pages which fall outside the top 2,000 must make a convincing business case for remaining on the site".

By: Alex

Alex — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 10:51:15 +0000

Speaking from experience I would agree with comments that say you need an up to date CMS for numbers 2 and 3

We already have a CMS that impliments number 3 and it is a pain in the neck because:

a) half the time the emails that tell you content has expired don't arrive, and the CMS gives you no other warning

b) the cms is so complicated that all 'review this content' requests come to me as no one else wants to learn how to use it, I then have to go to the person responsible for the content, who 99% of the time will say. I'm too busy at the moment, (scan page for 2 seconds) it all looks fine.

c) We can only access the CMS on site. So if a page expires on friday night, generally we can't update it till monday morning unless we fancy driving in on the weekend.

All in all i'm glad we are getting a new cms soon.

By: Crys

Crys — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 14:14:18 +0000

Got any great suggestions on how to convince the overly-red-taped, overly political, “the department who maintains the site is possessive and ignores the product the website is about” type of organization that they should be using a CMS (and maybe that the people who code the product should be involved with writing the content so it’s not wrong more often than not)? I think you’re right about making it policy rather than a personal battle, but many companies like that simply don’t use any kind of CMS because, as you said, everyone wants a stake and thinks they’re the most important — and that means every page has custom layout, design and coding…

By: Paul Boag

Paul Boag — Sun, 11 Jul 2010 11:00:33 +0000

The great things is that nobody needs to review or unpublish. Most CMS would allow this to be an automated process with a bit of work. That way nobody can get the blame it just happens :-)

By: Melinda

Melinda — Sun, 11 Jul 2010 10:45:55 +0000

This could be the start of a beautiful thing! Each organization needs to review this as a starting point and operationalise it to suit them. In particular, with reality in mind! Who will monitor? Who will review? Who will make the call to unpublished the page? How would this work in asmaller organization? I'd love to hear from business owners who are already enacting a policy of this type.

By: Nathan B

Nathan B — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 17:21:21 +0000

Yes. How about a print-view-only version of the page that delivers the text in the print.css or nearly-no styles, emphasizing that the content is provisional but also making it available, and taking redesigns etc out of the review equation ..

By: Bobby Jack

Bobby Jack — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 13:16:10 +0000

Whilst I agree with the general principle, I'm a little wary of rules such as "Pages that do not meet a minimum thresholds [sic] of page views ... will be unpublished until rewritten." A page might have outstanding content, yet be organised poorly within the site hierarchy. Additionally, some content might be extremely valuable to a very small number of people.

I would definitely suggest taking in-bound links into account as well, but I wouldn't place any definitive rules stating that content must be deleted if it doesn't fulfill a tiny number of criteria.

By: Chris

Chris — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 06:08:42 +0000

Some great points there but one extra that I feel is worth including...

All good writters write with the reader in mind, this approach should also be used for all decisions in managing your website. More and more larger companies that I work with need coaxing away from building their website around their company structure rather than what is right for their customer.

Just because a company has 15 department directors doesn't create a need for 15 sections to the service area on the cwompany website. If some of these services cross over so much that it is impossible the target customer to differentiate between the two, structure the site in a way that is right for those customers.

This is definitely a change in thinking that is easier to achieve by an external agency than an established internal department.

By: james robertson

james robertson — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 16:04:31 +0000

Genius!

Of course Paul there is one underlying assumption - that you have a decent CMS able to implement these policies.

Otherwise they could easily create even more work!

That's quite a large assumption too - I am continually shocked at how many large organisations have NO CMS whatsoever!