Visio2002: How to Manage Your Web Site with Visio (301632)

SUMMARY

This article briefly covers the following topics with regard to managing your Web site with Microsoft Visio:

Map the contents of your site.
Automatically check your site for errors.
Keep track of the work done on your site.

If you manage a Web site's day-to-day operations, it is vital for you to have a clear picture of the site's overall structure and flow, to track development changes, and to monitor and repair broken hyperlinks.

For detailed information and steps, browse to this article at the following Microsoft Web site:

Microsoft Visio Assistance Center

MORE INFORMATION

Map the Contents of Your Site

Management of your site begins with analyzing its current state. When you map your site, you create an up-to-date graphic representation of the site's structure and contents.

Each shape in the site map represents a link on your Web site, and each shape includes information about the link type and location. By right-clicking a shape, you can browse directly from the shape to its Web location.

Automatically Check Your Site for Errors

Because the content on your site is effective only if users can gain access to it, keeping the links active and error-free is the most critical on-going Web-site management task.

When you map your site, Visio Professional follows each link within the parameters that you specify and tracks any errors it encounters. You can generate a report that lists broken links and associated errors.

Links with errors appear on the site map as shapes with red X's through them, so you can quickly gain a sense of where the problems lie.

Keep Track of Work Done on Your Site

If you have several developers working on your site, tracking their work can quickly become a full-time task. By using the Web Site Map comparison report, you can compare two versions of your site to quantify the changes made over a given period of time. The report compares the two versions and generates a list of differences. It not only identifies the links that appear in only one of the maps, but also lists the following link changes in both maps:

Error status
File title
File size
File modification date

For example, suppose you want to quantify the work done on the site each week. Simply map the site at the start of the week and again at the end of the week. Then, compare the two maps to generate a report of the changes. You can also measure the report against a schedule of work planned for the week to see if your Web-site project is proceeding on schedule.