Higher Education Web Estate Oversight
Decentralization leads to sprawling web estates
effective oversight strengthens branding, messaging and content quality making higher education digital marketing more effective
University and College
Web Estate Discovery
Web estate: the set of websites for which an organisation has technical responsibility and legal ownership.
Higher education institution websites typically come into existence independently and develop autonomously to meet their creators’ goals and objectives. Over time, this pattern of behaviour creates complex networks of sites, operating under a university’s domain name and outside as well.
Without high-level oversight, it is tough for institutions to know precisely how many websites they own, who has day-to-day responsibility or keep up with changes to the ‘network’.
And lack of oversight exposes institutions to a wide range of risks. Risks that can be mitigated and managed with data from comprehensive web estate surveys and audits.
University and College
Web Estate Data Collection
Informed by detailed higher education website research, our service maps entire web estates by scanning the millions of links between the constituent websites and microsites and their hundreds of thousands of pages.
Meticulous analysis of the data collected along the way combined with institution-wide outreach ensures that registry databases are populated with accurate ownership and website infrastructure information.
The registry’s database is the foundation for further web estate verification and analysis: identifying website content, technical configuration, webpage performance, web server and onpage security and privacy issues through standard querying and reporting.
All websites tracked in a registry
| # | ID | Name | Cat. | Date | Status | CMS | DNS | IP Address |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 |
001 | Biological Sciences | U | 2019-05-01 | 200 | Drupal 8 | bio.exampleu.ie | 192.168.250.100 |
 |
002 | Computing Science | F | 2019-05-01 | 200 | WordPress | cs.exampleu.ie | 125.349.250.101 |
 |
003 | Medical Sciences | F | 2019-04-15 | 301 | Drupal 7 | med.exampleu.ie | 99.125.003.009 |
 |
004 | School of Engineering | D | 2019-02-15 | 200 | Joomla 4 | eng.exampleu.ie | 99.325.103.109 |
 |
005 | Faculty of Arts | F | 2019-04-15 | 200 | Sitecore | arts.exampleu.ie | 192.165.109.103 |
 |
006 | Celtic Studies | D | 2019-01-01 | 200 | WordPress | celtic.exampleu.ie | 198.168.108.108 |
Web Estate Monitoring
University and College
Web Estate Monitoring
Agile methodology’s widespread adoption ensures websites are constantly updated: to better meet current needs, support new user tasks, resolve issues and improve user experiences.
At the same time, digital content is continually under revision, introducing the risk of errors or non-compliance with institutional policies.
The rapid pace of change makes it easy to overlook details, miss software updates or create security and privacy issues. It also makes it tough to see the bigger picture, manage risks and make decisions backed with accurate, timely data.
Our service supports user-defined scanning meaning web estate sites are regularly checked, issues identified and the relevant data available for reporting and oversight.
Who wants to hand over their email address without getting something great in exchange or have some salesperson start calling?
Here’s the deal. You’ve got questions. We’ve got answers. Ping us on Slack at HE-Digital or University Web Developers (search ‘eQAfy’) or message Paul Bradley on LinkedIn. We can take it from there…