Website Sustainability

Presented 26th March 2014, Department of Computing and Immersive Technologies, School of Science and Technology, University of Northampton, UK as part of the Computing Research Seminar Series. Citation: Turner, Scott (2014): Web sustainability. fig share .  http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.1005663

A new article has been published in  Ariadne  on the work done at the University of Northampton on web sustainability. Turner S (2012) . "Case Studies in Web Sustainability".  November 2012 ,  Ariadne  Issue 70  http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue70/turner   ISSN: 1361-3200 At the moment organisations often make significant investments in producing Web-based material, often funded through public money, for example from JISC. But what happens when some of those organisations are closed or there  is no longer any money or resources to host the site? We are seeing cuts in funding or changes in governmental policy, which is resulting in the closure of some of these organisations. What happens to those Web resources when the organisations are no longer in existence? Public money has often been used to develop these resources - from that perspective it would be a shame to lose them. Moreover, the resources might be needed or someone may ...

Ahsan Anderson has being working with Scott Turner from the University of Northampton on issues around Web Sustainability using a website designed to promote STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) outreach activities as the vehicle. The work is being funded through a  Nuffield Science Bursary .  The project has been in three parts: Investigating possible tools and approaches for web sustainability; Developing a sustainable website to specification. Investigating possible tools . Details of this are available through these blog posts Best free tools for website sustainability -  http://websitesustainability.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/the-best-free-tools-for-website.html How to get it out there for pennies -  http://websitesustainability.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/hosting-how-to-get-it-out-there-for.html STEM site The site was the first we developed using the principles of web sustainability. Developed and hosted using  Weebly  beca...

Some of the work from this web sustainability project has been summarised in a recent blog entry at:  http://blogs.northampton.ac.uk/expertsatnorthampton/2011/09/27/web-sustainability-its-gone/ The importance of sustainability of publicly funded web resources is considered. This work has been supported by funding from JISC. The site can be viewed at https://sites.google.com/site/emknorg/ or http://www.web-sustainablity.net/emkn/ Survey about this material can be found at: http://www.eSurveysPro.com/Survey.aspx?id=67775a0a-336f-45a5-a222-2f1a6615752c please feel free to fill it in or http://www.eSurveysPro.com/Survey.aspx?id=cec22f0a-e467-4c15-a319-74d96bb8ed9d

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...

The website under-development is currently completely separate from the www.emkn.org site and is hosted on a Google sites site with connections to a Dropbox site (used as at temporary measure) Main page: sites. google.com/site/emknorg/home Three examples of other pages are shown below: Example 1: Networking and Good Practice :  sites.google.com/site/emknorg/services/networking-good-practise Example 2: Technological Services: sites. google.com/site/emknorg/services/technological-services Example 3: Enterprise Development:  sites.google.com/site/emknorg/services/enterprise-development The flash based Tube image has been converted into a more search engine friendly image map and HTML links and ALT tag describing the link aiding accessibility. Click here for the image map Content is being migrated from the dropbox to Google Sites Google analytics has been added to the site both Google sites and Dropbox to capture that information. Analytics is also add...

One of the hope for goals of the project is to make it easier for search engines to find the site, especially one of the key features of the site - the nicknamed 'Tube Map' which can found at sites.google.com/site/emknorg/home/map . This map provides a route through the services the partner universities provide.  "The services are divided into eight categories, or  tube lines . You can navigate these by clicking on the menu of services above, or by looking around the map, and clicking on the  tube stops . This will reveal the services that our universities offer, along with contact details and case studies." EMKN website So one of the elements that has been consideration to improve the chances of picking this important feature of the site,  is using image maps instead of Flash from Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) point of view. Two key reasons for moving over to an image map instead of an interactive flash version: 1. Searchbots  such as Google s...