Spring and Fall Cleaning
As each semester begins, consider setting aside time to clean up your site and make a plan for ongoing maintenance over the course of the semester.
Remember, if something is on your site, it is visible to the public and available in search engines such as Google. If you have incorrect information on your site, people will see it—make maintenance a habit.
Updating your website may seem like a daunting task requiring a large time commitment, but checking and updating a few key things makes a big difference in a small amount of time. If you do not have time to make all the changes you want to, just do the most important items, and make a plan to address further changes.
Consider scheduling a day of beauty with the CHSSWeb team to discuss more comprehensive updates, if needed.
Check & Plan
Faculty and staff listings: check for accuracy, and missing images and bios.
- CHSSWeb's import process does not remove people from your site, so faculty and staff who are no longer with your unit will remain on your site until you remove their bios.
- New hires are added a few days after their first paycheck, usually about two weeks into the semester.
- If you are using pages to list faculty rather than relying on CHSSWeb's people pages, you will need to update those pages as well.
- Review faculty and staff bios for completeness and consider putting out a call for faculty and staff to review and update their bios.
- Faculty can also update their own course section descriptions and add syllabi when they update their bios. Here are instructions for updating bios.
- Find information about how new people are added to your website.
Site titles and program titles: the new semester often brings new roles for faculty and staff.
- Site editors can manage the site and program level titles on their website.
- Faculty ranks are imported from Banner.
- If you have questions about a faculty rank, contact the CHSSWeb team.
- Find out more about site titles and program titles.
Update content: review content on your website that you know may change each semester, such as advising information.
Events: add upcoming events.
Articles: think about how you want to use your site's articles this semester and develop article topics.
Student and alumni profiles: Review the profiles associated with your program pages. Do you have profiles? Do they represent your program well? Are they current?
Graduate student bios: If your site lists graduate student bios, review them for accuracy and for missing images or text. Remove bios for people who are no longer with the program. Unpaid graduate students are not automatically added through the CHSSWeb imports. Notify the CHSSWeb team of any people who are new to the program and need to be added.
Broken links: fix broken links on your website. Each month we run a scan to help identify broken links, so make a plan to review these monthly. The results of that scan and tools for fixing any broken links can be found on your site's admin Dashboard.
Update & Purge
Site editors: Review the list of editors who have access to your site. Let the CHSSWeb team know if any should be removed.
- You can find this list on the Dashboard below the Quick Links and Tools section. Click the "Site Editors" heading to view the editors.
- Keeping this access up to date is an important step toward keeping your website secure and making sure you know who is making changes to it.
Pages: update or delete pages as necessary.
Content blocks: Delete content blocks that are unused (not on a page). If they are not on a page, they are not serving any purpose on your site.
Links and documents: Delete any links or documents which are no longer in use. Keep only those documents which you are actually using on your web site.
- If you wish to maintain copies of old, unused documents, download those documents and then delete them from the CHSSWeb system.
- Old documents stored on your website continue to be available in searches. The system sends a list of aging files to the site manager each spring and fall to help with this process.