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Intranet Publishing Guidelines: Navigation/Organization
Presenting a Unified Picture
An important goal for EPA's collective Intranet services is to offer each "customer" (staff member, contractor, etc.) full access to the entire distributed collection, regardless of the point at which s/he enters the system. Reaching the goal of providing the convenience of "one-stop shopping" in a large and diverse Intranet requires that each collection of information, in addition to serving its own particular constituency, must be recognizable as part of the EPA network.
Dead Links
It is incumbent upon the data owner to periodically check his/her document collection for dead links. There are commercially available programs that will traverse a site to check for broken links.
Dead links inevitably occur on Web servers as pages are modified, moved, or deleted over time. However, dead links can quickly damage a Web page's credibility and usefulness. The data owner for each Web project is responsible for monitoring and maintaining their collections. Dead links should be removed or corrected as quickly as possible.
When changing URLs on your document collections, coordination may be required with other servers which point to those URLs. When moving a Web page to a new URL, courteous page owners often leave a note providing a link to the new location.
Restricted Access:
Documents and collections that are not intended for open access (i.e., not yet published, not fully marked-up or tested, internal committee working group notes, etc.) cannot be linked from openly accessible documents or placed in openly available directories without information on the restrictions and an explicit "under construction" warning.
It may be necessary to coordinate with the NCC Webmaster staff to explicitly exclude restricted access documents from site-wide fulltext indexes. A full-text indexing system will be employed to provide searching access to all of the materials on the server that are not specifically designated for restricted access, in addition to a catalogue that will consist of the metadata records that will be submitted for each document or collection of documents.
The search engine is able to examine the text of documents on the Intranet. On some occasions it may be desirable to omit information from being searched. To exclude a directory structure containing that information from being indexed, insert an empty file called .noindex into the directory to be excluded. For more information , read Hiding Web Pages from Search .