Maintaining Your Site

Congratulations Art! Your site is "on the air"! You've sent e-mail to everyone you know announcing that fact, and you're starting to get visitors. So... now what happens?

One of the sad things I see on a lot of Scout unit web sites is a lack of site maintainance. Some of the more egregious offenses I see: dated material such as old calendars (as much as 2 years dated!), dated information such as "Our next campout will be October 17-19, 1998 at Camp Wahoo. Make sure you plan to attend!" (yes, those 1998 pages are still out there in 2013+), and just plain wrong information such as Merit Badge requirements that changed 3 years ago. And by the way, if you have rank and merit badge requirements on your site you are wasting your time and effort. The BSA changes requirements so often that you can't keep up. Just link to the dang things and let someone else do the work for you. meritbadge.org is a good start. The same advice goes for BSA forms. Don't even try to keep copies on your website because next year they are sure to change. Your council's website probably has a page of forms that link to the "official" BSA ditto. Link to that page and call it good. That's just one reason your website can look stale and unmaintained, even if you do maintain other areas. It's real easy to lose track of form and requirement updates.

How do these things happen? Each site probably has a different story, but some of the reasons may be: Webmaster no longer in the unit and didn't make plans to pass along the site to a successor, lack of interest by the unit in keeping the site up-to-date, no one really in charge of the site, and more.

Remember that you now have a long-term commitment — especially if you have a domain. As webmaster you should roam through your site at least weekly to find dated material and either delete it or change it to reflect updates. "Dated material" also means bad links. Make sure that your links, internal and external to your site, resolve correctly. Webmasters move things around, so a page you've linked to on another site may not stay there permanently. Also look for mistakes, misspellings, etc. You'd be surprised at how many of these you can find after not having looked at your site in a while. I once found a date mistake on our homepage over 2 weeks after I originally published it!

How can you ensure your site doesn't become "stale?" Well, there's a variety of things you can do:

• Add new features. This keeps people returning to your site, if nothing else just to see "what that idiot's done now." "Features" can mean new pages about recent events, announcements about future events, new ways of doing things, or even, if you're tired of the whole thing, a complete "makeover".
• Get some "active content" such as a weather or news ticker. This ensures that at least something on your site is current.
• Get your site linked by other sites. This is a real incentive to keeping things current. After all, you don't want someone coming to your site and seeing a bunch of old, outdated stuff. Your local Council probably has a web site and will provide a link to yours. Scouter.com has a unit web site registry to which you can add your site along with a few details about your unit. There are other Scouting oriented sites out there that will do the same.
• Make your site a group effort. If others in your unit have an investment in the site they will want to keep it looking good. You can have each patrol or den write and maintain their own page (subject to editing of course). Your Committee Secretary can pass along the minutes of Committee meetings to be published to your site. The Scribe can keep the calendar and meeting plans updated and provide minutes of PLC meetings. Now that there's a youth Webmaster position they can all pass along their info to him for website updating.
• If you will be leaving your unit, or are just tired of doing all the "web stuff", plan on how to transfer management of your site to someone else in the unit. And then don't look back. Once someone else is in charge, let them do their thing without any interference or "suggestions" from you.

[<< Previous]		[Next >>]
Disclaimer || Copyright © 2002-13 BSA Troop 53 || Privacy statement