Updating the A-Z Website List

The A-Z Website List is the official registry of UCSF websites. The registry is managed by IT Web Services via ServiceNow, and requires the participation of each UCSF website owner to regularly update and verify their information.

Some benefits of keeping your website info up-to-date on the A-Z Website List:

  • Easy findability through the main UCSF.edu website, which links visitors directly to the A-Z Website List.
  • Websites on the A-Z list are prioritized in searches through UCSF websites.
  • Improved search engine optimization (SEO) for users finding your website through Google or other search engines.

All websites hosted by IT Web Services are added to the A-Z list, unless marked private during the request process.

To add a new site:

  1. Go to https://ucsf.service-now.com/ess/website_management
  2. Select "Manage UCSF Websites."
  3. Checking the box next to "Check this box if you are registering a new website..."
  4. Fill out the form
  5. Submit

To update an existing site record:

  1. Go to https://ucsf.service-now.com/ess/website_management
  2. Click “Browse My Websites” to view existing sites listed under your name, and select the site that you want to update.
  3. Be sure to include a description of your site in the “Additional Information” field, which helps in keyword searching.
  4. For IT Web Services hosted websites, choose "external." If the hosting company email and phone are blank, details at this internal Teams file.
  5. Submit

Video tutorial

Transcript (txt)

Details provided in this captioned video recording of how to manage website records via the Manage UCSF Websites form. If you have a public site, this also updates the A-Z List.

Two examples include:

  1. how to set a site's status to retired
  2. how to update a site's business owner or technical contact 

FAQs

Question: What if my site does not appear in the A-Z List?

Answer: Any site marked private in our records will not show up in the A-Z List. Even if your site is private, please verify your other data is correct per step #2 above.

Any public site that is not in our records will not show up in the A-Z List of websites.

Question: What if my site wasn’t found in the “Manage UCSF Websites” search?

Answer: If you believe the site to be in the inventory and it wasn’t listed in the search results, give the form a few seconds after your search to allow the search results to populate. We want to avoid creating duplicates.

Question: Can the Business Owner and Technical Contact be the same person?

Answer: Best practice is that these be two different people.

Question: What if I want the site retired?

Answer: Change the status from “operational” to “retired” and select a “retirement date”.

Question: My site is marked as 3rd party hosting with Acquia but I thought it was hosted by UCSF and I don’t have the Acquia contact info. What do I do?

Answer: If you have a UCSF Drupal Site Builder or Starter Kit site, please mark the Hosted by field as “internal”.

Question: Do I have to fill in the Billing Information fields for Cost Center and Speed Type?

Answer: These are not required fields. Billing information only applies to recharge for Custom Websites. More details at https://websites.ucsf.edu/blog/new-web-hosting-recharge-custom-websites.

Notes:

  • Think about how people will look for your site. If you are the Department of Anatomy you might consider changing your site title to Anatomy, Department of so that the site is listed at A instead of D. 
  • Keep the title short and specific.
  • Provide a different Technical Owner and Business Owner for the site. The Technical Owner is the daily contact for website issues, and the Business Owner is the overall program manager, such as a department chair, director, or PI. We will generally reach out to the Technical Owner first, and then the Business Owner if there continues to be an issue. 
  • Eventually, there will be an automated feed between the ServiceNow website inventory and the new A-Z list; for now we are doing monthly pulls of the data.