Maintaining Web Pages: A Plan

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All Web pages will need to be changed eventually so a good maintenance plan should be in place. As subject matter changes, the courseware must also be changed.

Web page maintenance is more than just changing content. Maintainability is a measure of the ease and speed with which errors, flaws, and other inadequacies in a set of pages can be located, defined, and corrected. The maintainability of courseware is often the best forecaster of its cost-effectiveness.

You may find that, over time, maintaining Web pages costs more than writing them. This cost is more than offset by the fact that you'll also find that pages which resist maintenance have an outstanding chance at failure. Such pages reduce the effectiveness of the Web-based course.

The most simple way to maintain a set of Web pages is to find those that need changing and then make repairs or replace them altogether. Material to be added will require that you find the right place to insert the new information. Without a tracking system, this can become difficult and you may find yourself constantly re-reading each page just to see if it needs a change or not. It is also likely that the same Web page will be in another course and that page, too, will need the change.

The amount of time and effort spent in re-reading and changing Web pages is variable as it depends on the scope and content of the course. Add more time and effort if there are more courses to maintain. Maintenance costs, however, are usually a constant. The amount of time, resources, and money rarely changes. This clash makes for short tempers, worn nerves, and rushed work.

These side-effects can be reduced by creating a Web page profile. The profile tells, at a glance, what the page is about, any subordinate pages, all of the courses affected by this page, and other relevant descriptions. The profile gives the added benefit of allowing you to create new material from existing Web pages. A profile may look like this:

Web Page Name: Modular Web Pages     File Name: modular.html

Senior Page:
	None
Subordinate Page:
	mod1.html - Motivational Web Pages
	mod2.html - Orientation Web Pages
	mod3.html - Instructional Web Pages
	mod4.html - Reference Web Pages

Scope / Content:
	Course: Web-based Training
	Tasks: scope, content, deciding function, deciding modular-type
	Audience: instructor, doc specialist, editor
	Page Locations: ABC School Web Server, XYZ School Web Server
	Courses affected by this Web page:
		1001 - Web Page Creation
		1004 - Intro to Course Authoring

We can gather quite a bit of information with this type of profile, but it doesn't help very much when it comes to equivalent Web pages. Equivalent Web pages are alternative versions of Web pages, but with the same content. A consequential map will help here. This type of map shows all of the consequences of a change to the various courses containing Web pages that will require changes:

Web Page	Equivalent Pages	Courses
A001	M016, N033	1001, 1004
A002	M017, N034, U058	1001, 1004, 1006
A017		1001, 1004, 1112, 1080, 1090
B032	K011, J001	1033, 1111, 1113
B033	K012	1033, 1111
C020	G060	1040, 1041, 1055

For Web pages to be maintainable and modifiable, they must be designed that way. If Web pages are tested while they are still models, the need for subsequent changes are reduced as well as simplifying the process of making and controlling any changes that must be made.

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Last Modified: February, 2005