By now you should have checked all of your page footers and updated your copyright statement, at the very least, to ©2008. How is your navigation holding up? Are you linking to any long-ago abandoned projects, summaries, activities or other things of an expired nature?
Do you have title attributes on your related links? Do you have title attributes on your navigation? If not, why not? It's an easy fix to make, and it's one of those things you can do to your site that people really appreciate. Also, check your breadcrumb navigation and, if you're using it, your college navigation.
Speaking of college navigation, if you are using it, do you use it on every page of your site, or just some? Is it clear to your users which is which and when they should expect it and when not?
How about your graphics? Does the Ansel Adams vista of your building and the surrounding campus show trees that didn't survive the recent storms, or parking that has been re-engineered into green space? Is there new construction nearby that should appear in the background but doesn't? It looks pretty, but if it confuses someone looking for you it should probably be updated.
How about the basic structure of your Web site? Three times in the last three years I have happened upon someone else's idea of how a site should be architected and been… less than impressed. There can be a lot of politics involved, and you can't change a great many things about a site, but if you can streamline the structure and eliminate duplications and false-starts, you can drastically cut down on the time it takes to maintain your site—or train someone new to come in and maintain it for you.
Imagine opening up the top-level directory to peek inside and finding your old friends, the images folder, the sharedcode folder, the Templates folder, maybe a graphics and movies folder, and then your pages. Got an index.html page? Sure. index.shtml? Well, yeah, since the update. Are they the same? Shouldn't the .html page point at the .shtml page, by now? If you put a redirect into the .html version, anyone getting there from an old link or bookmark will automatically be forwarded over into the new page and you don't need to spend resources updating and maintaining both versions of what should be the same page.
A meta refresh is in order, here. You can place the following meta tag into the <head> of your document and anyone visiting this page will immediately be forwarded on to unl.edu. Since none of the content of the old page will ever be seen, you may as well delete it all, and just keep the basic framework of a Web page, with nothing in the <body> at all. Such a page will load quickly, and move the user along seamlessly to the new page. You can pause by changing the zero, below, to some other value, indicating how many seconds we should expect to rest on the old page, before moving along to the new.
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;url=http://www.unl.edu" />
Make a point of opening up your Web site this week and deleting all of your false-start pages. If you have an index1.shtml, index2.shtml, index3.shtml as well as oldindex.shtml, newindex.shtml and testindex.shtml, it will be terribly confusing when it comes time
to train someone new in what is important, what can be deleted, what is actually being linked-to from various other pages, and so on. When I do these kinds of experimental pages, I try to name mine bogus.shtml or trashthisone.shtml to make it easier on the next person, but the best solution would be to delete these false-starts and experiments quickly, before they begin to take on the patina of legitimacy usually reserved for bad architecture.
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