The First Steps to Web Governance Karma
A web estate audit produces masses of data needing careful scrutiny to yield a useable list of a college’s or university’s websites.
Sites using variations of an institution’s principal domain name are relatively easy to find. Those that have been nurtured on the quiet or been built using external funds may have adopted entirely unconventional domain names and prove harder to find.
The trickiest group to track down are the ‘rogue’ sites: designed and developed by external agencies, hosted on commercial platforms and with domain names offering no clear connection to a parent institution.
When a discovery exercise is complete the ‘definitive’ list of websites will likely have some or all of the following characteristics:
- User experience: confused or broken customer journeys, inconsistent branding, dated and duplicated content or content that doesn’t rank appropriately in searches
- Governance: unclear ownership/accountability for individual sites, uneven legal or regulatory policy implementation, no website lifecycle management
- Technology implementation: inconsistent updating of software, multiple generations of multiple content management systems, low re-use of standard web technologies, unclear data back-up and protect and a confusing mix of self, internal and external web hosting.
Collecting relevant data allows exposures to be identified and prioritised: the first steps in web governance karma.
