Maintenance Plans

About this guide

This guide was developed to help provide direction on changes that need to be made to web content, prioritize those changes, and serve as a mechanism for defending our web standards over time.

Each week, one member of the Web Team will serve on “Web Maintenance Duty” and will spend their time working through the various priorities spelled out in this guide.

Tools

Siteimprove dashboard: “MnDOT web maintenance report”: Use this dashboard to identify issues to work on. We will also receive weekly reports from this dashboard each Monday morning so we can track progress over time.
Microsoft Planner plan: “Web content maintenance”: Use this plan to help prioritize and coordinate our maintenance tasks and check-ins with stakeholders.
Microsoft Lists list: “Editors and Stewards WWW”: Use this list to look up which stewards, coordinators, and web editors to coordinate with on specific content decisions.

Priorities

Correct all misspellings
Resolve all broken links
Check for obsolete content
Fix accessibility errors
Address optimization issues
Address best practices violations

Correct all misspellings

It only takes a few misspellings to damage the public’s impression of our website. Use the Siteimprove dashboard to catch them before our users do.

Siteimprove puts misspellings into three groups:

Confirmed misspellings: Confirmed misspellings are listed under the "Misspellings" tab. To see a misspelling in context, click on the number in the "Pages" column to see which pages it occurs on. You should take immediate action to correct these.
Words to review: Review words to confirm whether they are misspellings or words that are actually correct in the context of a specific site(s). The more words you review and categorize, the more accurate the spellcheck will be in the future. Reviewing these words is a lower priority and can be done if you have down time after resolving all other maintenance priorities. Senior members of the team will dedicate time to reviewing words every so often.
Approved words: Approved words won't be marked as misspellings in the future. This is useful if you want to avoid having proper names, addresses, and brand or trademark names flagged in future spellchecks. This is where you’ll find all the words that have been reviewed and were determined to not be misspelled.

Siteimprove Help:

Once you have corrected all the confirmed misspellings, you can move on to the next maintenance priority.

Resolve all broken links

Use the Siteimprove dashboard to identify broken links. You may need to work with web editors, content coordinators, and/or content stewards to make changes necessary to correct broken links.

Siteimprove puts broken links into three categories:

Confirmed broken links: These include links that have been confirmed as broken, either automatically (by Siteimprove) or manually (by us). Links that return a 404, soft 404, or 410 status code are automatically confirmed as broken. You also have options to Dismiss broken links using the Dismiss button.
Dismiss for now: The link will be moved to the Dismissed links tab but if the HTTP status code of the link changes, it will automatically be moved back to the appropriate category. The link will be removed from the broken link page if the link returns a 200 HTTP status response.
Dismiss forever: The link will be moved to the Dismissed links tab and will stay there unless we revert the decision. Siteimprove will still check the links frequently and provide the current HTTP status code in case we decide to undo the decision.
Links to review: These links may only be temporarily broken, or links that are only broken for some users. This list should be reviewed manually and links either dismissed or confirmed as an issue.
Confirm: This confirms the links as broken. The link will be moved to the tab “Confirmed broken links” with a note to say when the link was confirmed and by who.
Dismiss: Using Dismiss you can, “Dismiss for now,” “Dismiss forever” and make a note explaining why the link was dismissed.
Dismissed links: These links are either not broken or links that cannot be fixed. These are similar to what Siteimprove formerly called “Ignored links.” All previously ignored links will now be listed under this new tab. For these links, a decision has been taken and can be reversed using the “undo” button.

Siteimprove Help:

Once you have resolved all the broken links, you can move on to the next maintenance priority.

Check for obsolete content

Use the web content maintenance plan in Microsoft Planner to check for obsolete content, identify upcoming maintenance tasks, and schedule check-ins with various content stakeholders.

Once you have addressed all the Planner tasks for the week, you can move on to the next maintenance priority.

Fix accessibility errors

Use the Siteimprove dashboard to identify accessibility issues on our website, as defined by the WCAG 2 Guidelines. Issues are grouped by conformance level (A, AA, AAA) and severity (error, warning, review).

You may need to work with web editors, content coordinators, and/or content stewards to make changes necessary to correct accessibility errors.

Siteimprove Help:

Once you have fixed all the accessibility errors, you can move on to the next maintenance priority.

Address optimization issues

Good SEO is about optimizing the content and technical aspects of your site for both search engines and users. Follow the recommendations in the Siteimprove dashboard to ensure our site is SEO- and user-friendly.

You may need to work with web editors, content coordinators, content stewards, designers, and/or developers to make changes necessary to correct optimization errors.

Siteimprove Help:

Once you have addressed all the optimization issues, you can move on to the next maintenance priority.

Address best practices violations

Use the Siteimprove dashboard to identify best practices violations to correct.

You may need to work with web editors, content coordinators, and/or content stewards to make changes necessary to conform content with best practices.