Web site maintenance

Webmasters' User Group

Site Maintenance

Besides keeping your content current, you should routinely check your site for broken links. You may use Dreamweaver's built-in link checker, or a utility Web site. You should also notify others who are linking to your pages when you change a URL.

Using Dreamweaver's Link Checker
Utility Link Checking Web sites
Changed Links
Publishing a Redirect Page

Using Dreamweaver's Link Checker

>Check links within the current document:

Choose File > Check Page > Check Links
The report appears in the Link Checker panel (in the Results panel group).
To save the report, click the Save Report button in the Link Checker panel.
Note: The target browser report is a temporary file—it will be lost if you don’t save it.

Check links within a portion of a local site:

In the Site panel, choose a site from the Current Sites pop-up menu.
In Local view, select the files or folders to check.
Initiate the check by doing one of the following:
Right-click (Windows) or Control-click (Macintosh) one of the selected files, and then choose Check Links > Selected Files/Folders from the context menu.
Choose File > Check Page > Check Links.
The report appears in the Link Checker panel (in the Results panel group).
In the Link Checker panel, select a specific link report from the Show pop-up menu to view another report.
Your report choices are Broken Links and External Links. You can check for Orphaned Files when you check links across an entire site (see the next procedure).
To save a report, click the Save Report button in the Link Checker panel.

To check links in the entire site:

In the Site panel, choose a site from the Current Sites pop-up menu.
Choose Site > Check Links Sitewide.
The report appears in the Link Checker panel (in the Results panel group).
In the Link Checker panel, select a specific link report from the Show pop-up menu to view another report.
Your report choices are Broken Links, External Links, and Orphaned Files.
A list of files that fit the report type you selected appears in the Link Checker dialog box.
Note: If you select Orphaned Files as your report type, you can delete orphaned files from the Link Checker panel directly by selecting a file from the list and pressing the Delete key.
A list of files that fit the report type you selected appears in the Link Checker panel.
To save a report, click the Save Report button in the Link Checker panel.

Utility Link Checking Web sites

Changed Links

Run a link search on the old URL and notify resulting page owners to update their links with the new URL.

Go to the search feature on www.wmich.edu or to an external search site such as google.com.
Enter link:http://www.wmich.edu/oldURL where "oldURL" is your old URL.
The results are all pages that contain links to your submitted URL.

Publishing a Redirect Page

It sometimes makes sense to publish a redirect at the old URL to direct people to the new URL. Place the following code in the header of your old page. "0" refers to the number of seconds before the redirect occurs and "URL" is the URL of the new page.

<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;URL=www.wmich.edu/newpage.html">

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