Website Sustainability

Previously I looked at using other tools    to host sites sustainably (or even free)  such as:  Dropbox  (see: http://websitesustainability.blogspot.co.uk/2011/03/alternative-hosting-approach-1-dropbox.html )  Google Sites (see: http://websitesustainability.blogspot.co.uk/2011/03/google-sites-for-sustainability-week-3.html  ) Hosting options: http://websitesustainability.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/hosting-how-to-get-it-out-there-for.html Free tools: http://websitesustainability.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/the-best-free-tools-for-website.html Amazon S3 (see: http://websitesustainability.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/thoughts-about-using-amazon-s3.html ) In this post I look at a real web site being moved to being hosted on google Drive as a case study of moving sites that need preserving on to Google Drive as a hosting option. 1. First step is to capture the static HTML files. We need to copy all the files we want, this has been discussed previous see ...

As well as moving the site to a more sustainable hosting solution we would like to make it more sustainable by increasing the number of people visiting the site. Making the site more accessible to search engines or Search Engine Optimisation is key to this. To trial this the following have be trialled on the  http://www.web-sustainablity.net/  site. Keywords Try to limited to six keywords. Description:   A short summary description of the page not the site. From Google's suggestion of  best practice Accurately summarise the page's content Create unique descriptions for each page (where possible). Title - Create accurate and unique titles. From Google's suggestion of best practice Accurately describe the page's content Create unique title tags for each page Use brief, but descriptive title Approach taken was make the title up using two approaches  Either First "East Midlands Knowledge Network:" and the second part made up of the University ...

The project all along has set out to move the website in a sustainable way across to a google site that at the very least provides a doorway to the EMUA's East Midlands Knowledge Network site. The approach has been to build Google Sites (Google) version of the site leading to either pages on the google site or  pages on a dropbox site until the google site version is ready. The aim at the start of the project was to have the site independent of the partner institutions so no-one partner has more control than another over the site. But, is there another way that both increases the sites sustainability? One possible way is for the site to be independently hosted (via Google Sites) but the partner institutions/universities  to have ownership (and possibly to host their own) content. No one institution would have overall control but manage their own resources/presence on the site. This idea has been floated and has the potential to improve the sustainability by the instituti...