You’re ready to archive your website and take a look at it one last time. You give pages one last look, thoroughly checking them for anything you may have missed in the past. There’s nothing to do now but reminisce–or, if you don’t see any point in being emotional over a website, you’re here to look at things that worked and didn’t work, so your future websites will look better.
And then you notice it — missing content. There’s nothing to do now, as an archived website will not be live anymore, and any changes you make will not be seen by anyone outside of the management team. Still, it would be good to figure out what happened, right?
Someone Streamlined Content
When building websites, it’s not just about adding elements to make it more robust. Sometimes, you also have to delete obsolete functionalities and change redundant structures. If that is the case, you can trace the root of the change through snapshots provided by website capture software. Once you’ve seen what necessitated the change, you can defend it against any claims that you provided misleading information.
Someone Accidentally Deleted It
The tragic story of someone accidentally deleting all the elements of the Toy Story 2 animation a year before its release might be flashing before your eyes when you notice incomplete sentences or incorrect information on the final version of your website. You think someone might have made a mistake, and that’s often the case.
It will be good to know where the deletion came from and who did it, so you can help them avoid making the same mistake in a live website. Remember, a live website is out there for any visitor to see; if they encounter content that gets deleted, they might think something has gone wrong or you are hiding something.
Someone Wanted to Correct a Previous Error
The missing content you’re curious about might have been deleted because a well-meaning employee wanted to correct an error. The saved version might have done the damage, which you will not be able to tell in just one glance. It’s important to track the changes that have been done on site elements to see where exactly the change happened and what the person was trying to do.
When it comes to content, there’s a traceable path to follow if you just bother to look. It could be the website’s snapshots, or it could be the drafts or save points when you commit to a decision. You’ll also want to see the log of these changes to figure out whether the person was covering their tracks. They might be responsible for a bug in your website and instead of solving it, they decided just to delete it, but their actions backfired.
You may not think of site content as an enemy or friend, but the person controlling them could be. Tracking the changes the website has been through over time can show you which ones are friends and which people are not concerned about the integrity of the website.
