Control over your website's content just got a boost with the release of Mintox v5.42.1, which sees the addition of scheduling functionality to the Web Pages, News, and Knowledge Base components. You're now able to set the date and time that you want your web page, blog article, or knowledge base topic to appear online and offline.
How It Works
You'll notice the new Online status on the web page, news article, or knowledge base topic pages in the backend from this morning, that will look like this:
The status can be set to Online, Scheduled Online, or Offline:
When you select the Scheduled Online option you will be able to set the date and time you want it to appear live on the site.
You can also set a date and time for it to come offline as well by clicking the Set Offline Date checkbox:
You still set your Page Display Settings like normal to assign the page to a location in the site's information architecture, and then Save and Close.
In the View All Pages screen you will see that the page is set as Offline (the yellow triangle) but that in the column for Online it will have a clock face icon, signifying a page has been set to appear online:
The process works the exact same way in the News and Knowledge base components.
404 Errors
We've talked before about the impact 404 pages can have on your site and rankings, so it's important to know that if you set content to appear online and then come offline again, that URL may have been indexed by google or bookmarked by a user and once the page comes down a 404 page will be left in it's place. If it was a page with a lot of traffic it's important that you remember to add in a URL redirect to prevent that. Check out the Mintox support article here for a refresher on how to add Redirects in the Web Pages component.
Maximising the Potential
Being able to schedule pages and articles to appear online and offline is a great first step in having more control over how and when your content is delivered to your audience, but with a bit of further work this functionality can allow you to maximise the impact that content has. For example, you could schedule holiday or sale related hero banners to appear and disappear on your homepage, linking them to new landing pages that are also scheduled in. Your site could flip seamlessly from a "Buy Now for Christmas!" campaign to "Boxing Day Bonanza Sale!" on the homepage without having to login to the backend late on Christmas night - allowing you to focus on the most important parts of the holiday season with your loved ones.
For more information on how to get the most out of this Mintox feature, give the team at Clue a call at the office on 9368 0777.