Manage Content

Review your content to make sure it is useful. Plan for periodic auditing and user testing. You should be doing some content maintenance at least once every month. For more heavily-used content, you may need to plan reviews weekly. Questions to ask in maintenance are:

• Are all my links working? (In LibGuides, you can run the Link Checker under Tools > Link Checker. The UL Web Team also scans for broken links.)
• How do I know my content is working as intended? What is "success" for this content? How do I measure that success?
• If the content doesn't meet my criteria for "success," how will I improve it? Should I conduct user testing? Rewrite the content? Remove the content altogether?
• Is the content still relevant? Should I update it with new information, or remove outdated content? 

The days of creating "nice to have" content are over - web content is expensive to create and maintain. 

Too much irrelevant content suggests that the entire website is not useful. That's an assumption we want to avoid. Keep your content succinct, useful, and up-to-date.

• Is your content no longer relevant or necessary? Then it is time to remove it from the website or LibGuides.

• If the outdated content is a link, paragraph, or LibGuides box, you can delete it from your site or guide.

• If the content is an entire guide or page, then download a backup first. Once you have downloaded a backup, you can delete the page or guide. If you need to redirect content to a new page or guide, reach out to the web team for help.

  • LibGuides: Click the "gear" icon in edit mode and select HTML backup. Please do not move unneeded guides to "Unpublished." LibGuides is not an archiving tool. Having unpublished guides makes it harder for me to maintain the important guide.

  • Website: In your web browser, select "File > Save As" and save a copy of the page to your computer.