Reworking Your Site

Some considerations when reworking your site; How to make sure your visitors aren't left out in the cold.

Transcript

1. Reworking Your Site
2. Goals •  Don’t leave your visitors stranded •  Google Analytics is a powerful tool for planning and follow-up •  Make sure you have a migration plan… that you can handle
3. Step 1: Take Inventory Take Inventory of Your Current Site  Objectives  Pages  Content  Images and Files  Most Popular Pages, Search Terms, and other Googley things
4. Step 2: Formulate a Plan Determine How You Are Going to Move  Review your Inventory to make informed decisions  Create a method for mapping old URLs to new URLs  …or cheat and Map old URLs to database identifiers…assuming the reworked site is in a CMS
5. Step 3: Execute the Plan This Will Likely Be Time Intensive  Rework the navigation  Rework the content  Freshen up the design  Move things around  Go wild  …But don’t forget to keep your Map up to date.
6. Step 4: Install the Map Some Pages have been pruned; Others moved to a new URL and some may still be at the same URL. With an accurate Map a developer can work some magic.
7. Here There Be Magic
8. Explaining the Map Using a Google Campaign, mark some Pages as “Moved” and others “Dropped” I used a Google Campaign URL Builder http://conductor.nd.edu/google-campaign
9. Example of the Map /start/ http://oit.nd.edu/new-to-nd/? utm_source=migration&utm_medium=scp &utm_campaign=moved /start/parent_information.shtml /start/parent_information.shtml/? utm_source=migration&utm_medium=scp &utm_campaign=dropped
10. Moved Pages Redirect from the original URL to the new URL, but add Google Campaign Information In the case of OIT, the campaign name is “moved”
11. Dropped Pages Redirect from the original URL to the same URL, but add Google Campaign Information In the case of OIT, the campaign name is “dropped”
12. Oit.nd.edu – Google Analytics View
13. Observations You can automate the conversion of some sites…or portions of the site. The less HTML you store in your content, the more portable it is.
14. Why Do All This Your website is for other people…Don’t strand them. Broken links are a reality, but with some foresight and planning, you can mitigate the issue.
15. Questions Jeremy Friesen Lead Application Developer, Web Agency University Communications jfriesen@nd.edu @jeremyfriesen blogs.nd.edu/jeremyfriesen
16. Resources Link Checker http://linkchecker.sourceforge.net Search Engine Optimization http://www.google.com/webmasters/docs/search-engine- optimization-starter-guide.pdf Lynda.com license from OIT training@nd.edu