At 12:44 on Wednesday, 16 Feb 2005, Michael Cooper wrote:
>> Does anyone have experience of having to change their museum
>> domain name or URL for any reason? The reason I ask is that
>> the local authority I work for plans to absorb all public
>> sites under one corporate web service, which could
>> potentially mean losing autonomy. I am also concerned about
>> the possibility of losing a URL that has been established for
>> nearly ten years now. Apart from the practical issues of such
>> a change is there any argument to be made from the Museums
>> perspective about preserving an on line identity and if so
>> where can I find further guidance on this matter?
>
>
> My sympathies - we are also trying to maintain our own identity, but the
> corporate roller coaster is hard to withstand. It is quite possible to
> retain your own URL though and have all its traffic redirected to the LA
> site. Best of both worlds?
Especially as domain name renewal is so cheap.
If anyone wants help with domain name services or redirection, I'm sure
there are several sources of advice and resources available on this
mailing list.
However, I fail to understand the clamouring of organisations to have all
their web services in "one box" so to speak, since the founding principal
of the Internet is distributed computing, if you have all your websites on
one server and it goes down you have no web presence at all. This applies
to different servers in the same building as well in the case of disaster
prevention.
What is to be gained by having all the sites under one service? There's a
lot of information out there to back up the notion of leaving the status
quo, especially the government directives to avoid linkrot, maybe you
could insist that all existing pages are mirrored and mapped to their
original url even if the physical location of the pages changes.
http://e-government.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/Resources/WebGuidelines/WebGuidelinesArticle/fs/en?CONTENT_ID=4003762&chk=LYiA8c
or: http://tinyurl.com/6l5bz
there's a reference here to stable url's:
http://e-government.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/Resources/WebHandbookIndex2/WebHandbookIndex2Article/fs/en?CONTENT_ID=4000242&chk=P9KN1k
or: http://tinyurl.com/5sqg6
that might be useful
I guess we're on the "bring it all in-house" curve of the
outsource/insource cycle?
ho-hum.
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