Author: Elena Talanker
This blog is from a presentation at the We Are Digital Commons event on October 29, 2019.
Moving to a new house is always an exciting event. The smell of the fresh paint, empty airy rooms and all the new possibilities! This is how we all feel about upcoming Drupal 8 migration for Digital Commons 2.0. We are here to help you to move to a new house with clean, ordered and uncluttered content.
The majority of the websites on Digital Commons platform were launched several years ago. In many cases, administrations have changed, editors and publishers who built pages on these sites may have moved on, leaving behind abandoned, unstructured, and outdated content.
Web Managers have a bit of work ahead of them. This is a job for the person/people who have the most knowledge of the site.
We've Gotten You Started
We‘ve crawled your websites. Yes all of them! We've put together an Excel workbook that includes:
- Updated Site Map
- Broken links report
- Last modified date for every page on your site (to help identify outdated content)
- Google Analytics reporting for top pages from October 2018-October 2019
- Missing ALT Images to help meet accessibility requirements
Your Turn
Web Managers, you now have all you need to analyze and clean your website.
- Respect your site users and fix all broken links from the 404 – Broken links Report tab
- Respect accessibility requirement to help those who are using screen readers to navigate your site - add Missing ALT Text for Images tab.
- Organize Site Map
- Pages at the root, should be placed in the menu, they have been identified and highlighted in RED.
- All pages that have section Title different from the section path should be corrected – highlighted in YELLOW on your site map
- Does your site provide the latest and greatest information for the site visitor, delete outdated content – based on Last Modification Date on the SiteMap.
- Fix all duplicate Titles on the pages, check whether Page Title describe the topic of the page?
- Update Meta Descriptions that have duplicate content or missing. Remember that Titles and Meta Descriptions are key elements for Key words search by Google.
- Look at Pageviews from Google Analytics. High numbers of pageviews reveal most visited content on your website, low numbers - outdated or not discoverable content, for example page is buried to deep in the structure. Maybe some information should be consolidated on the parent page.
You may have heard about Marie Kondo method of “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up”. Well, it is a well-known fact that tidying up your home transforms other areas of your life. Same here, a well-structured site map makes it easier to identify and manage website content owners and helps to keep your site up to date.