All University websites should be updated regularly. Our audiences and users expect websites to hold the most relevant and most recent information, and updating frequently can help your office or department garner more attention online and in the academic community.
The importance of regular updates
Our audiences expect our websites to hold the most recent information available. We are the primary source to answer questions about their educational experience, and they expect to find those answers on our websites.
By updating your website regularly, you won’t lead your users to incorrect or outdated information. Your users will trust that they are finding the correct information and can answer their own questions via the website, which can cut down on other correspondence with your office.
Updating your website regularly also has other benefits, including:
- Search engines reward sites that are updated more regularly and make them appear higher in search results;
- Users come back to your site more often for valuable resources and information;
- Relevant content is shared via social media and email, which strengthens the status of your office or department’s authority on particular subjects.
How often you should update your site
Your site should be updated a minimum of three times each semester. That should include updates for:
- Faculty and staff listing with contact information
- Curriculum and course catalog year changes
- Opportunities for internships, outreach, etc.
Users will not return to your site to view the same content repeatedly, which is why it’s important to post news and events and incorporate other points of pride into your content as often as possible. Adding content at least once a week is ideal.
How to update your site
Before you update the content on your site, we suggest working in a Word document or in an unpublished page before you add, rewrite, or reformat content that is already live.
- For sites on the new Ragin' CMS, you have the ability to utilize workflows. This means, you can save your page as a Draft, as Published, or as Archived. When you make revisions on a published page and save it as a draft, the published page does not show the revisions until you save it as published. The published page will be live until it is saved as archived. This allows you to make revisions on your page ahead of time and publish the page with ease when you're ready.
When you’re updating one page on your site, make sure you’re updating related pages so there isn’t conflicting information. One way to minimize the number of revisions you need to make per update is to avoid repeating information in too many places. Instead, embed links to the main source of information wherever you want that information accessible.
Follow these guidelines for web writing:
- Write for your audience. Who are the people visiting your site and what do they need?
- Use short, descriptive headings
- Embed links with action verbs that tell where a user is going and what they’ll find when they get there.
- Avoid using acronyms or jargon.
- Break text into scannable chunks.
- Use subheadings
- One idea per paragraph
- Use bulleted or numbered lists
- Follow the accessibility guidelines