Now the World Wide Web has been with us for two decades, it’s amazing to see how the entire corporate website landscape has changed in that time.

In the early days companies were slow to come to the web, and when they put up sites, they often didn’t regard their websites as importantly as they did their written communications elsewhere. Marketers were quick to take up the bat but Finance, Human Resources and Legal functions were slow to perceive that their traditional methods of communicating what they did had to change.

The situation couldn’t be more different today.

Can you imagine a major company that doesn’t use the web to communicate with its investors, clients, suppliers and would-be employees? The situation has come full circle, with the humble website often developing into a full-scale web estate. The largest companies operating across many countries have enormous territories of data, some current, some, unfortunately, out of date, and much of it run by subsidiaries and outside agencies.

Web Estate Governance was a phrase that didn’t exist a few years ago, but as the importance of web communications has risen, more and more functions within organisations now have a vested interest in getting their messages across – hence more disagreements about how things should be represented online. And the politics don’t end inside the company, because more and more external regulation and outside standards are now in the mix. From EU rules on cookies to UK accessibility laws, the list of things a website needs to cover grows almost by the week. Just look at Wikipedia’s definition (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Website_governance) of website governance to see how complicated it’s all becoming.

In the middle of the argument usually is the website manager, whose role has become much more complicated within the company politics at the same time as it has become more difficult to keep a handle on what’s out there on the web estate. So having a proper methodology for managing the website is much more crucial now than ever before, and having the tools to support that is essential for any web manager who wants to manage his or her time properly. 

Sitemorse began as the tool of choice for those who wanted to ensure their site was free of broken links and code errors, but through various versions the software ‘engine’ has grown and developed alongside the web to become something that can be used much more holistically as part of the planning process of determining what the site should achieve, to building it while ensuring it covers all the necessary bases around internal ‘brand’ compliance, to meeting current standards around code quality and speed while also meeting third-party requirements, law and regulation.

Sitemorse is used by many web managers in organisations large and small through the process of planning a site, getting it online and then ensuring it meets all its targets.

Another great advantage of Sitemorse is that it works on external servers with nothing to download, so can be used alongside many different content management systems. Having to change CMS is usually a long and difficult process for many companies.

Over the next few weeks we will be looking in more detail at how Sitemorse can be used as a vital check for all those involved in web estate governance, beginning with the planning of the site and what it’s meant to achieve.