Everyone’s got their great idea for a web app, so here’s mine. It would be really helpful for web site owners (i.e. me) to have a monitoring service that tracks the age of the content on each web page.
One of the (many) challenges involved in managing larger web sites is keeping all the content current, especially when there are multiple owners for that content.
As your site grows, it becomes harder to know which pages are in need of refreshing and even which ones need to be taken down.
Do you know what percentage of your web site’s pages were updated in the last week/month/year? I don’t.
This tool — let’s call it “Content Monitr” — would index the pages on your site and monitor when there changes are made to the content on any page.
It would keep a record of these changes so that you could see how current your content is and would enable you to easily zero in on any especially old content.
Having this type of reporting would enable you to make sure you are applying your limited content resources appropriately.
For example, are you updating your most popular pages frequently enough or are you paying undue attention to pages that do not warrant it?
The tool could also be set up to send out email alerts to content owners based on user-defined aging criteria so that they could be informed when their content had not been updated for a certain period of time — say, three months.
The tool would need to be able to be set to ignore insignificant content changes, such as fixing typos; but then again, why not enhance the tool so that it can identify spelling errors (much like Inspyder InSite, which I reviewed recently).
The business model would be based on free accounts with limited functionality (say, a 50 page limit on the number of web pages monitored) moving up to be paid accounts.
And, of course there would be enterprise-level accounts with additional functionality such as user roles, multiple domain monitoring, and so on.
Given all web apps currently being created based on crappy business cases and business models, I think this one’s a winner.
So, come on someone, please go ahead and create it. Or, better still, tell me that something like this already exists.
Maybe you should register the domain name and look into getting it off the ground as it defiantly is a great idea.
Awesome idea. I know that certain web site development clients of mine would love that feature when maintaining their static – yet cms-based – web pages.
I agree with Jermayn. Register the domain and lets roll. I would be willing to work with others on the idea.
Thanks for the positive feedback, but I’m afraid I’m just the ideas guy. I _really_ was hoping that someone would have already come up with something like this.
On a sidenote, if this app was created it would be the perfect thing for Google to purchase and integrate into their suite of webmaster tools. Now there’s some incentive!
I will dig around to see if the law of the Interweb applies (e.g. If you think you’re the first person to think of it, you’re probably the last) to this idea, but honestly I haven’t heard of this feature being a part of any CMS I’ve played with in recent projects..
*Jeff* — clearly you are the guy to make this vision a reality! Go get ’em and ood luck!