Spring Cleaning, Even on the Web

By Patrick Powers
Director of Digital Marketing and Communications

There’s a lot to be said for the notion of Spring cleaning. It’s a good time of year to rout out the dirt, dust and disorder that crept into your home when you weren’t looking.

The Webster University web server is no different and it could use a little tidying up.

Team members from both Global Marketing and Communications and Information Technology in the upcoming weeks will be reviewing the nearly 500,000 pieces of content on the public-facing website in an effort to determine the good from the bad.

Good content is regularly updated and accurately reflects Webster University. Bad content contains out-of-date pages and photos that no one maintains and no one visits. We know we have some work to do.

Our plan is to evaluate all content on the server with three exceptions:

• Content created within SiteStudio that falls within our approved templates;
• Content created specifically by the colleges and schools; and,
• Content created by faculty within their dedicated web space.

Essentially, we’re looking to clear the server of those thousands of pages created more than 3-5 years ago that no one has even loaded to a browser in the past 12 months.

So what can you do to help?

If you are maintaining web content on webster.edu, take some time to review what you have in there. Is there content you no longer need taking up space? Feel free to delete it or create a list of files to be deleted and submit them via the Webster University work order system.

We’ll backup the entire server and clear it of these unwanted files on April 4. Any files deleted in error can be restored via work order request.

Nothing online goes away forever, but it’s time for us to get organized. If you have any questions, feel free to contact Patrick Powers at patrickpowers59@webster.edu.