Best Practices: Maintaining a Site

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It’s critical for Site managers to understand the importance of maintaining their sites. And the best way to do this is to share guidelines that are periodically reviewed once a month or once a quarter.

Below are some best practices for maintaining your site.

Dashboard

• Keep an up-to-date Site Carousel (balance between news and resources). This ensures your site members will always see new and relevant content, which motivates them to keep coming back to the site and relying on the content you make front-and-center.
• Frequently asked questions, resources or quick links should be easily visible. Have trending or popular content on your site? What are the reasons most users come to your site? The answers to these questions should always be in easy reach for your members and followers. 
• About the site: Have a clear description about the site's purpose, its leadership team, what users can find on the site as well as how to communicate with them (Slack channel, email).
• Governance team tile: Have your Site managers and owners in easy view for your members. This way people easily know who is responsible for the upkeep of the site, and who to reach out to with questions.

Search

• Functional content is content that helps people do their job efficiently and effectively and should appear top of search. To support this, use topics and a custom summary for this type of content. 

Pages

• Ensure your pages content is accurate and up-to-date. We recommend enabling auto-governance for all your site's content, so you can be reminded to check up on and verify the validity of the information you publish.
• High resolution imagery. Use good images. Simpplr is intended to be visually appealing, so make sure you're using hi-res, appropriate images to convey the messaging in your content. 
• Have your content proofed and spell checked. Assigning someone to be a content editor is always a good idea. This helps keep your content professional .
• Use topics and custom summaries for functional content.
• If links are used, double-check to make certain the links are working.

Events

• Include events that are public-facing or relevant to all staff.
• Don’t include events for targeted users.
• Include detailed descriptions of the event with images and contact information for questions.