The Rhetoric of Hypertext

Editing and Publishing

Maintenance

Other books by Marc and Kim Millon

Update regularly

Check your links

Analyse who is visiting your site

Campaign to eliminate web litter

The nature of interactive web publishing means that once you have uploaded your site, that may be only the beginning. For the web is not and never will be a medium where content is carved in stone, left for years, months, even weeks unchanged. It is most powerful as a timely, up-to-date medium that reflects the changing world we live in. It is worth bearing this in mind before embarking on a web project in order to be aware that considerable time needs to be set aside for regular maintenance.

Update regularly
If you want to get people to make return visits, and indeed to bookmark your site, then it is essential to keep it up-to-date by changing and adding new content as frequently as necessary. How frequently you change your content naturally depends on a number of factors, above all whether you have new and compelling content to add. There is no point ever in adding superfluous or unfinished content simply to put on something new. It is a good idea, however, to have a clear strategy at the outset for updating so that your users will know what to expect. Quarterly updates are the least frequent that I would suggest; monthly or weekly updates might be more useful for your site; and in some cases, topical information, or an on-line diary for example, might necessitate daily or near daily updates. Always point out new material on your Welcome page (a ‘New’ button or logo can be used), and consider including a date at the bottom of a page which indicates when it has last been updated.

A web site that includes frequent updates may need to include some sort of archive for past material. If this archive is likely to grow into a vast database of searchable and useful information, then thought should be given to including an index and perhaps even a search engine to help users access it.

Check your links and check again
It is essential to check from time to time all external links that you include in a site. Such pages can move; they can be updated in such a manner that they are no longer relevant to the relationships or contextual associations that you are drawing; they may become so popular that they are difficult to access and thus give repeated ‘error’ messages; or they can disappear completely. So even once your site is up and running successfully, as part of your regular maintenance
program, you should systematically check such links periodically.

Analyse who is visiting your site
Unlike most traditional print media, the web has in-built powerful mechanisms that enable the content provider to learn a great deal about the audience that visits your site or sites. For indeed, all those who come to a site may leave considerable information about themselves that is recorded in that site’s unique log. The intelligent interpretation and analysis of such information14 can give you real clues about your audience: how many visitors you have received and on average how long they have stayed on your site; what countries, cities, or states they come from; even what hours of the day and days of the week are most popular. You can find out whether your audience mainly accesses your site from home or work; what browsers and versions of browsers they use; what are their favourite entry pages; from which page do they most usually exit your site. Moreover, it can be extremely useful to know what the top referring search engines and directories are; what key words are most often used in searches that lead to your site; and whether there are other sites that link or refer to your site.

Such valuable information can help you to direct your site more effectively to your chosen audience, to tailor material to your users, and to make changes that will allow you to reach out to find new visitors.

Campaign to eliminate web litter
Another task that the content creator needs to give some attention to is the mundane job of housekeeping and the tidying up of web litter. Throughout this book, I’ve stressed the ease, speed, and minimal expense with which content can be published on the web. This means, however, that it is equally easy to upload test versions or drafts of material that may never be intended for general public viewing. Similarly, pages or whole sites may go out of date or simply become no more relevant than last month’s newspaper. And yet, such material, even when uploaded as ‘hidden’ pages that are not registered or linked to any other pages, can cause considerable clutter: robot search engines relentlessly trawl the web in search of new material and may inadvertently register such pages. In other cases, pages that have been registered then moved or shut down, may still be listed on search directories, thus leading users in many cases up the virtual garden path.

Yet because web space is cheap, human time costly and limited, little attention is given to this ever-growing problem. It is easier simply to leave out-of-date material on a host server than it is to eliminate it. But the web is growing at such meteoric and exponential rate in any case that we risk being overwhelmed by new content as it is. Web litter – inconsequential or out-of-date content – only compounds the situation.

It is therefore good web practice to clean up after ourselves. Do your bit for the cyber-environment by using FTP or telnet to delete any such obsolete files or directories.

Editing and Publishing

Rhetoric of hypertext