We are quickly approaching the end of another school year. Therefore, it is time to take stock of your web site content. It does not matter if your site is a school site or an internet or intranet site. It is still a good time to review the content you site and remove content that may have been specific to the current school year.
Site Pages
The first area you want to look at is site pages. During the past school year, did you or other content editors for your site create pages with content that was specific to the past school year. There are several different ways to address these now obsolete pages.
The easiest way to remove a page from your active site is to go into Page Status (under Page Options) and mark the pages with obsolete content as: Hide Section. Why Hide Section rather than Hide Selection? First, both hide the selected page and all subpages, but there is a slight difference between these two options. I’m going to give you an easy way to remember the difference. Hide Selection merely removes the page from any navigation menus on the left side of the page. If someone bookmarked the page, they can still find it. Additionally, search engines can still find it and when a user clicks on the results of a search that points directly to the page, they will still be able to open and see the page. In other words, but you can find and display the page if you know the URL, but you cannot select it from navigation menus. On the other hand, Hide Section, not only hides the page from navigation menus, but it also hides the page from search engines. Granted, the page may still show up in search results for awhile because no search engine crawls the entire web every night. There is just too much content for that to be feasible. However, eventually, it will disappear from the search results. On the other hand, if someone bookmarked the page, they can still find it. The problems with both of these methods is that you cannot create a new page with the same name as hidden page. There is, however, one additional option. From Page Status, you can click the check box to the left of the page name and then click the Archive button at the bottom of the dialog. While a person who has bookmarked the page can still find it, the page when displayed adds the word: Archived to the end of the page title. Also, once archived, you can create another page on your site with the same name as the old page.
Perhaps you really want to delete the page, and not just archive it. This option no longer is available because of the difficulty (read that as near impossibility) of retrieving a deleted page. If you are really sure that page should be deleted from your site, you can send an email to presence@ocps.net to request that it be deleted. Consider such a request as permanent and once implemented, the page is gone and would have to be recreated from scratch. Because of the severity of this action, only site owners can make such a request such as the department head or school principal.
Warning: If any other pages link to a page you request to have deleted, those links will be broken and there is no easy way at this time to find them.
Tip: You only need to Hide, Archive, or Delete a site page if it applied to one-time content that does not repeat in each year. If the page is still valid from one time period (year) to the next, you may only need to update the content on the page, not create a new page.
Site Content
Often you will find that merely updating the content from one year to the next is sufficient. For example, your school supply list page exists every year, but the details of the list may change. Even in this case, you have at least two options on how to proceed.
First, you can simply replace the content within a content portlet with new content for the new year. Because content portlets do track versions of the content, it is even possible to return to one of the previous versions to reactivate that content.
A second option is to hide the current content portlet and add a new content portlet where you will place the content for the new year.
Images
Currently, updating images with a new version of an image having the same name does not work reliably. However, by the start of the 2018-19 school year, we are expecting this known issue to be fixed. Currently, the recommendation is to upload a second copy of the image with a different name and then change the URL to the image on the page to the new copy. After the fix, you will be able to upload a new copy of the image using the same name as the original image and it will appear on the page without additional changes being needed.
Documents
Documents can currently be updated by simply uploading the new copy of the document using the same name as the original version of the document (assuming there is no time identifier such as the year in the document title) with the option to overwrite existing versions turned on while uploading the new version. Links to the document on any page in the web site do not have to be modified in this case. If you really want to keep annual versions of a document (such as policies), the recommendation is to create a subfolder within your site’s Files section in File Management called Archive where you can upload a copy of each version of the document in which the year (or other identifier) is included in the filename. Thus you might want to upload new versions of the document twice when you create them, once to the folder that is used for current live documents and a second time to the archive folder with a version (year) identifier in the filename.
It is also a good time to check that document links open in a new window (blank window) so that when the user closes that window, they return to your site. If you allow documents to open in the same window as your site, if the user closes the window by clicking the close button in the upper right, they will have also closed you site requiring them to navigate back to your site.
Third-Party URLs
As you are going through your site, be sure to check all third-party URLs to insure that they are still valid and direct the user to an appropriate page. It is also a good time to check that links to all third-party URLs open in a new tab so that when the user closes the tab by clicking the close box in the upper right of their browser that they are still within your site. Third-Party URLs can appear both in content pages as well as external links in the navigation.
References to E-mail Addresses and Contacts
This also a good time to check all referenced e-mail addresses in your site’s content as well as all contact names. People come and go from OCPS or even from individual departments and schools throughout the year. While this type of information should be updated immediately when someone comes into or leaves a department, we recognize that this does not always happen. Schools: Do not attempt to edit or replace the Faculty and Staff page which is managed by the district.
Siteimprove
Use your site’s report from Siteimprove to make as many corrections and enhancements to your content as possible over the summer before the start of the school year. Remember to consider ADA guidelines especially with respect to color contrast, image and link tooltip text, broken link correction, and blank pages or pages with little significant content. If you have several pages with minimal content on each page, consider consolidating those page to make it easier to users to find information by putting related information in a single page.
Emptying the Trash
We recognize that your file folders will over time accumulate many images and document files that are no longer needed. While you can continue to just leave them in your file folders, if you begin to get confused about which files are current and which were perhaps test files or perhaps even file that you no longer need, the presence team can delete files from File Manager upon request of the site owner (department head or school principal). Just send a list of the file names and what folder they are in to presence@ocps.net. The best way to do this is to do a screen capture and highlight the files you want to delete. While Word (both desktop and on-line) have the ability to capture a screen and perform some basic functions on the image such as resizing or cropping the image, the best results are done with a third-part screen capture tool like Jing (free) or Snag-It (minimal fee) both from Techsmith or other similar tool. These tools allow you to capture portions of a screen and highlight areas with a color (like yellow) to emphasize areas such as the files to be deleted.
Cleaning out your site now will prepare it for work later this summer when you begin building the content for the new school year. There will be open labs over the summer held on the second Monday of each summer month. To sign up for additional help or just to have a quiet place to work on your site away from other interruptions and distractions, sign up within Canvas the SchoolMessenger Open Labs.