Visit Your Own Site

When was the last time you visited your own Web site?

I don't mean when was the last time you updated a page, checked it over to make sure it validated and everything was spelled correctly. I mean when was the last time you came to your Web presence the way one of your own users might—especially a new user?

It's a good practice, and it probably should be done several times a year, but at least once per year would be an improvement for many of us. Do you have pages up that explain how your organization is planning to overcome any Y2K issues? Do you have directories filled with How To Use The Exciting New 2003 Version of the E-Mail Software? There is an awful lot of junk, online.

Cleaning it out will help you in several ways. First, it will make maintaining the rest of your site easier, because you won't have to wade through all of the distractions to find things you really want. Secondly, neither will your users. Looking things over and deleting the old stuff makes moving and updating your site structure much easier and that could be real important, real fast, if your site is one that is moving to the new UNL CMS project. Why convert a bunch of pages that are outdated and in the way, anyway?

Some of this is born of inertia. Some of it is just bad habit. In the Olden Days, I would often build a new, simple page with only the element I was working on present. That is, if I was trying to hammer out a new navigation scheme, or tweaking a table of data, I would build a Web page that contained only the new navigation, or only the new table. It was easier to me, it was less distracting. I would grind away at whatever it was and when things were working I would clip out just the relevant markup and paste it into the real page, and move on. Often as not, I would leave that stub, that experimental page, up on the server where it was unnoticed, unlinked and unloved. When I first stumbled across this method, I would name the page new -whatever the real page was. So, index.html became newindex.html. But some time later, I would find it really difficult to delete some of these stubby pages. What if I had linked to one of them, somewhere? About that time, I started naming these experimental pages bogus.html or trashthis.html. But even then, not all of them got deleted, I'm sure.

Web pages are simple text files, of course. Even the biggest are pretty small in the context of modern computing. But images are another thing. I stumbled upon a directory the other day that held about seven different versions of essentially the same image. One was 800x600 pixels. The next was slightly smaller, the next was the same smaller size, but saved at a lower quality, so the colors weren't as vibrant and the file size was much smaller. The rest were all variations on that theme—suck out some more color and trim the edges. This was really wasteful because image files (and movies) can be huge. Some folks do a better job at all of this than others, of course. But I'd bet that the average Web site may hold as much as 20% junk.

Take a look at your Web site. Look in front and behind the curtain. That is, tour your site with a Web browser and make note of links that are broken, links to pages announcing "News" that is now really History. Look for ways you can clean up the content on the page, as well. And then take a look at the file structure of your site. Look for unlinked files, duplicate files (especially images) and Things You Can Do WithOut.

When the time comes to update your site in any meaningful way, you'll be glad to have to do the work on fewer pages and files.