My grandmother kept a small notebook beside the telephone. Every number in it was crossed out at least once and rewritten beside the crossing-out: the pharmacy, the neighbour, the clinic’s reception desk. She would never have dreamed of leaving an old number in place. A wrong number in her notebook meant a missed call at the worst possible moment, so the notebook was reviewed every time something changed.
A hospital website is, in a sense, a much larger notebook for hundreds of families at once. Pages about heart care, contact details for the outpatient desk, forms to download before a visit: all of it is a promise that the information is current. This primer is for anyone new to looking after such a site. It is informational only, it gives no medical guidance, and it uses a short glossary so that the vocabulary does not get in your way.
Why upkeep deserves its own attention
People enjoy starting things. A new page feels like progress; a new form feels like a service. Reviewing an old page feels like housework. Yet for a family sitting at a kitchen table trying to work out which desk to call, the old pages are the ones they actually find, because older pages have had more time to be bookmarked, shared and indexed by search engines.
The result is that neglected pages quietly shape how people think of the hospital. A phone number that rings out or a download that does not open does not read as a small technical hiccup. It reads as carelessness, even when the staff behind the scenes are anything but careless.
A mini-glossary for beginners
These terms will come up in any conversation about keeping a site healthy.
- Dead link. An address on a page that no longer leads anywhere useful, often because the destination was moved, renamed or deleted.
- Redirect. A signpost that sends a visitor from an old address to the new one, so old bookmarks keep working after a page moves.
- Owner. The department or role responsible for a page being correct. A page without one slowly drifts.
- Review date. The day the page was last read through by its owner, ideally shown on pages that carry practical details.
- Retire. To remove a page that serves no purpose, ideally with a redirect, as a deliberate act and not an accident.
- Health check. An automatic test that visits a link and records whether it still responds.
- Dependency. Anything a page relies on to work: a file, a form, an outside website, an inbox.
The story of one page
Picture a page that explains how to arrange a first outpatient visit at a cardiac clinic. It is written carefully on a Tuesday. It lists a phone line, an email address, a form to fill in beforehand and a link to a partner laboratory’s booking page.
A year later, the phone line has been merged into a central desk. The email address belongs to someone who now works elsewhere. The form has a newer version in the clinic office. The laboratory has redesigned its site and the old booking link now opens its front page. Every one of those changes was sensible, and every one was made by somebody who had no reason to think about that Tuesday page.
This is how decay really happens: not through a single mistake but through many sensible changes elsewhere. Nobody breaks the page. The world around it moves.
Three questions for every page
A beginner needs a method that is short enough to remember. Here is one, and it works on pages, forms and links alike.
- Does it work today? Open it, click it, call it, submit it. Use a phone, as many visitors do.
- Is it still wanted? If no one would notice its absence, consider retiring it.
- Does it send people to the right place? Every number, address and link should land where the page claims.
Notice that the questions do not ask whether the page is well written. That comes later. First you want to be sure the basics still function, since a beautifully written page with a wrong number is worse than a plain page with a right one.
Reference pages need care too
Many cardiology sites carry explanatory pages that define clinical vocabulary, such as our explainer on the functional classification cardiologists use or a guide to how murmurs are graded. These are reference material, and the web team should never rewrite their clinical content. What the team can do is check that the page opens, that links within it still work and that the department responsible for the wording has looked at it recently. If a clinician says it needs changing, the clinician decides what the change is.
Where a tool can help
Clicking through every link by hand usually starts with enthusiasm and finishes as an abandoned spreadsheet. A link-management platform like URLSnow offers a gentler route: published addresses are stored together, and automatic overnight checks log which of them have stopped answering, giving you a short list of broken ones to fix. What a tool cannot do is judge whether a link that still opens is still the right one, so a person remains part of the loop.
A starter routine you can actually keep
Beginners often set themselves rules that would exhaust a full-time team, then drop them after a fortnight. A smaller routine is better.
- Make a list of your pages and write the owning department beside each one.
- Choose a small group of pages each week and run the three questions on them.
- Keep a plain record of what you changed and when.
- When you find something wrong in clinical wording, pass it to the owner without editing it yourself.
- Before creating anything new, search the existing list for a page that already does the job.
The last point is the one that most reduces long-term work. Many proposals for a new page turn out, on inspection, to be a request to improve one that already exists.
What to do with old printed material
The notebook by my grandmother’s telephone had a counterpart in every clinic: a pile of leaflets, appointment cards and folder inserts with phone numbers and web addresses printed on them. When a page or a number changes, ask which printed items quote it. A wrong number on a card in someone’s wallet can survive for years, so it is worth a line on the checklist.
A few mistakes beginners make
- Deleting without redirecting. People still have the old address saved; send them somewhere helpful.
- Trusting the confirmation message. A form that says thank you may still be delivering to nobody. Test it end to end.
- Fixing symptoms only. If three pages have the same outdated phone number, ask why, and find the shared source.
- Doing it once. A single clean-up helps for a season. A rhythm helps for years.
Back to the notebook
My grandmother’s habit was not clever. It was simply regular, and it was driven by a clear sense of what a wrong entry would cost. The same attitude suits a heart care website: treat each page as a number in a notebook that someone, somewhere, may need at a difficult hour, and cross out and rewrite it whenever the world changes. Add new pages when there is a real gap, but let the first question be which existing entries still need your attention.
