What you can do before migrating your website

The centralized resources of the new website offer an opportunity for site managers to get a head start on their migration prior to any direct work on a new version of a site.

Add people to the faculty and staff directory

Faculty and staff listings will be centrally managed in a searchable global directory to be launched later this year, while faculty and staff specific to your department/site can be listed on your pages. Our team is proactively working with college communicators to add faculty and staff to our unified directory, using existing websites’ information as a guide. Please review your website faculty and staff listings for accuracy, and email us at um.weboffice@maine.edu to let us know that this content is ready for our team to pull into the directory.

We will send you links to the new profile pages before they are “linked up” in the directory, and can work directly with faculty and staff to ensure the new profile is up to date.

Update academic program information

The new academic programs search launched with many links pointing to existing content on websites and course catalogs, and our team is working to publish new pages for academic programs using the program templates developed for this tool. .

Move static files to cloud storage (Sharepoint) or University Archive

Content appropriate for an archive should be moved to an identified archive location such as Sharepoint, Google Drive, and/or the University Archive to adhere to the new Title II requirements for such content. You can begin working on this now, and 91¸£Àû Digital can advise on the best solution for specific content on your site.

Static files (PDF, Word, Excel, Powerpoint) should be stored outside of WordPress going forward. If your site uses the “resources” feature, we can provide you a list of those files to make this transition easier. Reach out to us at um.weboffice@maine.edu to request your list of resources if you are ready to begin this work.

Review website to determine best route for migration

We have four options for migrating websites; before we get started with your site, we would like to determine the best route to take with you:

• Fresh start / blank site: This is our preferred method of migrating a website in many cases. We will re-create your website in the new design “from scratch” and invite you to contribute to this process. This will ensure that any orphaned/neglected web pages do not carry over into the new website.
• Migrate posts but not pages: If your site currently uses the “posts” feature for date-based updates or news, we can migrate the last 5 years (60 months) of posts to the new server. The rest of the site would be rebuilt from scratch as mentioned above. Posts older than 5 years will not be migrated; you can request archiving of your posts with the University Archive if that content is important to preserve (see below).
• Migrate pages but not posts: If your site does not use posts, or if you have not added posts to your site in some time, we can leave those behind and only migrate your pages. This will bring over all of your pages, but comprehensive review of those pages is necessary to find any images or files that should be re-added or re-linked to the content.
• Full migration of pages and posts: This option is available for sites that currently use the posts feature and do not have stale/orphaned content in pages. All pages would be migrated alongside posts less than 5 years old. As with the above option, comprehensive review of migrated pages is necessary to find any images or files that did not migrate as expected.

Please reach out to um.weboffice@maine.edu to discuss migration of your site if you are ready to get started!