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Information technology evolves rapidly.

Web Guide is no longer being maintained and the information on this page may be out of date. For assistance with managing course materials, please visit MIT's Stellar course management system.

ACS Academic Webpage Creation Guide

Maintaining Your Pages

A Web page or Web site is a commitment. You wrote your page or designed your site to be read and used. Keep the following in mind to ensure its continued usefulness.

Design with maintenance in mind and plan for future revisions.
Know who among your TAs and staff does what, and who is responsible for which pieces of information on your pages. Be sure that this is documented and readily accessible.
Use date stamping.
A visitor to your Web page should be able to judge how current and accurate the information is. A date on the page indicating the last revision gives critical information.
Use logical names for files; group files into directories.
Files, and therefore URLs, should have names which briefly but clearly indicate their content. When you have many files, use directories (like folders on Macintosh or Windows) to group logically related files. Document, in a README text file in the top directory, what each file or directory does, to remind you or future maintainers.
Consider what happens from one term to the next.
If the subject is taught both terms, you may want to use "fall" and "spring" subdirectories to keep the contents separate. If the course changes from year to year, but there is archival material from past terms which continues to be useful, you may want to have "fall1999", "spring2000", and "fall2000" directories.
Keep printed and Web versions of the same document in sync.
The expectation is that something on the Web is more up to date then a paper version. Whenever you update the printed version of a document that is also on the Web, you have an obligation to update the Web version, or else remove the Web version.
Try to avoid breaking other people's links to your pages.
When you delete or rename a Web file, it becomes inaccessible immediately. But the URL may continue to be in search-index databases for months or even years, and people who want to read your document will not find it by searching. Furthermore, people who have bookmarked the document will find their bookmark no longer works. Therefore, you should try to avoid deleting or renaming documents. If you must, leave a short document in its place explaining why the old document is no longer available, and give people the URL for its replacement if any.
Direct responses from comment forms, mailto:, or other email addresses to a mailing list.
If you include email response mechanisms in a document, the mail should to go to a list, not an individual (even if only one person is on the list). As people come and go, and responsibility moves from person to person, only the mailing list need be changed, instead of finding and editing each occurrence of the person's email address.
Set calendar reminders to revisit your pages.
Web pages often have time-based content. If a page refers to "next month", it needs to be revised when "next month" becomes "this month", and again when "this month" becomes "last month". If it announces an event in the future, it needs to be revised when that time comes. If it refers to a particular version of software, when the next version is available the page should be revised. It's possible that software to facilitate this through the use of META tags, e.g.
<META name="reminder" content="review 1999-12-14"> will be available in the future.