Updating Guidelines

Keep your website up-to-date

Current content is the hallmark of a useful web site. To keep MSU web sites up-to-date, please follow the guidelines below.

Planning your changes

Avoiding broken links

If the changes to your site permit, please use the same directory structure and page names. When you do this, users who have bookmarks leading to those pages will always be rewarded. In addition, search engines that have lag time of several weeks between their indexing crawls of your site will always show the correct page.

Redirect pages

From time to time websites require significant changes in location or organization. In that case, please be aware of the reality of broken links from user bookmarks and search engine indexes. To eliminate broken links to valuable content, visitors should be redirected to the new URL.

The best way to redirect visitors to the new URL is to use server redirection functionality. This usually has to be done by your server administrator. Please contact Web Services for assistance.

Graphics

• Do the graphics all have <img alt> tags? If not, review the graphic guidelines and insert the appropriate code.
• Are your photographs or other graphics still current? Is it time to replace with a new version?
• Logos: Do your logos comply with the published standards? Please review the guidelines and compare to your pages.

Usability

• Does the current version meet the needs of the audience you are intending to serve?
• Are the categories or topics labeled appropriately?
• Does your page or site now have a different scope or theme than when it was originally created? Do you need to redesign or rewrite any part of your page(s)?

Headlines

• Do your headlines use the <H2> and <H3> tags? If you're using purely visual styles to make your headlines larger, you're losing some benefits of search engine indexing that rates headline-tagged text higher than other text.