Content must be reviewed if it will continue to be useful. Plan for periodic auditing, user testing, and determine targets for success measures. You should be thinking about some maintenance tasks 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 I am not meeting success metrics (like not enough page views, too high of a bounce rate, or low clicks on key resources) how will I change the content to improve? Should I conduct user testing?
- Is the content I created still relevant? Does it need to be updated with new information, or should some content be removed? Is the entire guide relevant, or should it be retired?
The days of creating "nice to have" content are over - web content is expensive to create and maintain. What's more, having content our users find to be not useful will get them thinking that the entire University Library website is not useful - and that's something we want to avoid. Keep your content succinct and useful and up-to-date, and users will thank you.
