Management documentation

Whether the organisation's website has been produced internally or by a design agency, it is important that each element of the construction is fully documented.

Personnel within the website management team will eventually move on and need to be replaced. Without adequate formal documentation a great deal of time will be lost in new staff determining, eg, what markup to use in order to maintain a consistent look and feel.

A number of standards should be developed for the life cycle of a website or document, covering many of the following:

• the management structure that a document must be passed through before it can be published;

• the production of HTML pages, whether they are manually constructed or dynamically generated from a database;

• the production of other document formats, such as PDF and RTF from the source document;

• the organisational publishing standards, eg housestyle covering colour usage, font specifications, logo placement, writing styles, etc;

• the lifespan control of on-line documents;

• the organisation's designated web authors and their roles and responsibilities;

• the management and storage of archived documents, both electronically and paper based (records management);

• the management of the web-hosting service-provision contract;

• the administration of the web server (if controlled internally);

• the information back-up routine that has been adopted;

• the management of existing third party contracts for publishing or design work;

• records of software and license agreements that are used by the website team;

• the administration and use of any escrow agent(s);

• the maintenance of an asset register of all domain names/sub-domains registered by/owned by the organisation, eg, date registered, when to be renewed, and corresponding IP numbers;

• record of permissions granted by third parties for you to link to their website(s);

• record of intellectual property rights permissions obtained, eg, for text, graphics, audio or video materials used;

• manage passwords keeping a record for emergency situations.