Santa Clara University

Subsite Maintenance

The subsite administrator is responsible for handling feedback regarding technical issues, watching out for out-dated content, monitoring the site's activity, and making sure that the site is visible in search engine results.

Top 5 Maintenance Tasks

We've created a list of the top five maintenance tasks for subsite administrators. Regular maintenance will help to keep things organized in your site, and eliminate unnecessary pages and images in Commonspot and on the www.scu.edu Web site.

Delete and archive legacy site content

If you are publishing a site in Commonspot that replaces a site on the www.scu.edu server that had been managed using an FTP account, you will need to delete the old site's files from the Web server after publishing your new site. If you do not remove the files, they may be found via search engine results or links using alternate URL paths to the FTP directory. If you do not have access to your organization's FTP account, contact the University Webmaster's office in Media Services for assistance. 

Respond to Web browser or site performance feedback

The site should have a technical contact identified, either in the e-mail contact link in the footer of the template, or in the site's "contact us" page. In many cases, the technical contact is the same as the contact for other feedback; the site's content owner may also be responsible for subsite administration.

Review content for currency

The content owner can schedule time-sensitive content to appear or expire, or schedule a reminder email to be sent at a specified time. Without these automated actions in place, it is not uncommon to find site content (such as event notices) available after the scheduled date. The site administrator should be aware of time-sensitive content, and either notify the content owner or manually remove it if the content has expired.

Check site statistics

All sites hosted on www.scu.edu collect statistics in the Web server's access logs. Reports generated from these log files can be review at http://staging.scu.edu/statistics . After publishing a new Commonspot site that replaces an existing site, there will likely be broken links from search engines, other pages, or bookmarks to your old site's pages. Look in the "failure report" in site statistics for any references to pages in your site. This will be a good indicator of the number and frequency of requests using your old site's URLs.

Submit URL to search engines

If you have published a new site, re-published a legacy site, or significantly restructured an existing site, you may want to submit the URL to the leading search engines. This will accelerate the process of the search engine re-indexing link references to your site.

Of the following, Google is the most important one to be updated. The SCU site uses the Google University Search to support site-wide searching.