Forum Moderators: not2easy
I run a web site that has about 1,000 unique pages. Responsibility for keeping these pages up-to-date is distributed among about 50 people in the organization, who each act as contributing writers for a few pages on the site about their department's or project's work.
Ideally, each contributing writer would update his or her pages whenever there is something to add, change, or correct. In the real world, however, where maintaining the web pages is only one aspect of each contributor's job, the only way we can ensure the site is consistently updated is to set a production schedule that prompts contributors to update their pages at appropriate intervals.
I'm looking for comparisons from anyone who has implemented such a production schedule on two issues:
1) How do you determine the appropriate intervals for content updates?
2) How do you measure your site's overall "up-to-dateness"? And, how "up-to-date" is up-to-date enough?
In collaboration with our contributing writers, editors, and department heads, I have developed a schedule and performance measurements for my organization's site, but I am searching for other site's measures for comparison. In particular, I am searching for benchmarks on how current other organizations feel their site should be.
By way of background, the most dynamically changing parts of our site -- job postings, staff listings, publications, links, and so on -- are all monitored and updated daily, so I'm not concerned with those. The production schedule covers the rest of the site's content, which consists of pages that describe our organization's ongoing research and demonstration projects, our work in our main subject areas, and so on. Depending on the nature of a page, it must be reviewed and updated by the contributing writer from at least once a month (the most common interval) to once every six months (the least common interval).
In addition to my main questions, if anyone has had any interesting experiences with scheduling web site production, I would be delighted to learn about those as well.
Feel free to ask for clarifications if this doesn't make any sense!
>scheduling web site production
I always create a flat plan where content and design marry up over a specific period. Specify milestones in time where specific parts of the project need to be completed before moving on to the next phase of the plan. This helps focus the mind on one smaller job at a time.
