Website Support Clinic update – Working with your lead publisher

At a recent Website Support Clinic, I worked with a web publisher who wanted to make changes that affected areas of the site she didn’t manage. In these cases, while we’re happy to go through how to make changes at support clinics, we ask editors to work with their lead publishers.

The web publisher managed an undergraduate section of a school site. Currently, the site has a prospective undergrad section and a link on their homepage to a school intranet for current students.

The publisher wanted to create a new Students overview at the top level of the site that would contain a new Current students page and the existing Prospective students section.

As this would involve moving the Prospective students section, this meant that URLs would change, affecting Prospective postgraduate pages she didn’t manage.

Checking for approval

If URLs are affected, content owners will need to know about these changes. Especially with prospective students sections, many marketing materials will contain these URLs.

While I can go through how to move pages and the redirect process at clinics, I had to refer the web publisher to her lead publisher as they need to decide how to go about these changes.

In short, at our support clinics, we can teach you the skills and tools, but ultimately, lead publishers are responsible for content changes on their sites.

(For reference, we do have a guidance page on what’s involved in restructuring your site.)

Restructuring sites wiki guidance