We have seen many groups try to preserve the history of their group on their website. As a professional who has worked in the web field for many years, I can say this is generally not a good practice. It can clutter your site and make it difficult for both users and search engines to find the new and relevant data. The older content, although historical, is only of interest to a select few who are interested in history.
In other words, to have an effective website, it is essential to be presenting only the relevent and new content. When users see a site full of new content, they think it is active and vibrant. When they only see pages of old content, they think the opposite.
So what should be done?
Should I discard all these old files? Absolutely not!
Regardless of whether you have your primary site on the ACS Network, we can set up a space for you to archive documents, photos, and other important historical documents. These can be put into a forum -- if you have your primary website on the ACS Network, it can be a sub-forum to that. In essence, we are asking you to segregate your old content into a separate space. Access to this space can be limited so that officers and others who need to see historical documents can retrieve them and so that this content no longer appears in search engine results. As always, you can apply categories and tags to make the content easier to find.
If you are interested in a forum to archive any of your contact, please contact us at webhosting@acs.org.
