By Mark Wilcox, Campus Web Administrator

Web Site Upkeep

I thought I would take this month to remind everybody that "doing" a Web site doesn’t stop with creation. No, Web sites are living, breathing environments that need periodic maintenance. Links to outside Web sites change or are removed, information (like area codes) on your pages change or needs to be updated and occasionally you need to restructure your site based upon user requests.

Verify Hyperlinks

If you are using Microsoft FrontPage, you can use the FrontPage Explorer, Verify Hyperlinks feature to automatically check your links for you. If that’s too time consuming or if you don’t have access to Microsoft FrontPage there are several free sites that provide checking for you. You can search for them yourself on the Web or go to the Central Web Support site and follow the HTML Resources link.

Check out either Dr. HTML or Net Mechanic for link and HTML verification. Please keep in mind that since these services are wanted by many and are free, they sometimes are blocked because there are too many people on the site.

Why didn’t I put anything on the UNT site for local use? Well basically these services provide a lot more expertise than I could hope to give you in any reasonable amount of time. I would love to have set something like this up, and perhaps at some point in the future we will. Unfortunately, even a Webmaster’s time is finite and the things to do aren’t.

Periodically Re-evaluate and Update Your Site

It’s also good to have a periodic review of how your site looks. Perhaps when you first started out you were excited by how easily you could add colors, images and animations to your site. But perhaps you did such a good job with the wild color scheme, nobody can read it. Ask your co-worker’s, friends or my office for friendly advice on how to improve your site’s look and feel. We are not out to be Web cops and won’t suggest you never touch another Web page again (your friends might suggest something like that, but WE won’t!). We just want to make the UNT Web site the best university site on the Web.

Also if you have had staff rollover or contact information change in the past 6 months, please keep that updated. Not only for the "world" to know, but for my office’s help. We get many questions asked of us. Some of them, we can answer, many we cannot. We try to forward these questions to the relevant department. If we cannot find an E-Mail address or if the message bounces it’s a question likely to go unanswered or answered incorrectly because we will try to pass it on to the office most likely to know.

So please put a contact E-Mail address on your pages. Also if you do get mail from an outsider asking for help, please respond. Even if you don’t know either forward them to me (at www@unt.edu) or tell the person you don’t know. You will be surprised at how effective just replying to E-Mail can be in keeping our clients (whether students, faculty or potential students) happy can be. There is a company in New England that eclipsed $1 million in sales last year just over the Internet. This company does not make computer software or have a flashy Web page with the latest buzzword compliant gizmos. They make customized barbecue smokers. When asked for the secret of their success? They replied "We answer our E-Mail."

Don't Forget . . .

Don't forget that UNT publishing guidelines are on-line. And that we have a series of images for you to use on your page.

Until next time.  

Mark