Catalog Launch Prep for the Upcoming Academic Year

While most institutions begin preparing next year’s catalog in the spring, there are always a few last-minute tasks to be performed ahead of launching your catalog for the next academic year. Check out a few tasks to help put the finishing touches on your catalog, fix any remaining site errors, and set your students up for success.

Perform a Catalog Site Audit

It’s always a great idea to double-check your catalog for broken links, accessibility errors, and missing content throughout the year, but especially ahead of a new academic year. Our built-in site audit page makes this process simple. From this dashboard, you can quickly find errors, click into the page, and correct the issue. This not only improves the overall accessibility of your site, but also helps boost your site’s SEO and audit your site ahead of accreditation reviews. Throughout the academic year, you can perform quick site audits to get a pulse check on the accuracy and performance of your catalog.

Add a New PDF Cover for the Catalog Year

All of our catalog sites come with an automatic PDF generator, allowing students and staff alike to generate printable versions of catalog content within seconds. To further customize these print-ready versions, clients have the option of uploading a custom PDF cover. (If you don't want a custom cover, we can always provide you with a stock cover image.) This is not only a great way to add branding to your publications, but helps viewers distinguish between different academic years’ content. These custom covers can be designed internally (we love the idea of having a design-savvy student create the cover, or hosting a student competition!) and easily uploaded on the backend of your site.

Archive Past Catalogs

Rather than overwriting past catalogs, your institution should always keep previous catalogs publicly available and easily accessible. Not only do many accrediting institutions require this, but it is a best practice that can prove a valuable resource for your students and staff. With Clean Catalog software, your previous catalogs will be archived automatically and organized chronologically within a sidebar on your catalog’s homepage. If your institution prefers a more custom approach, we can format these archived catalogs however you’d like! Your archived catalogs can then be generated as printable PDFs, accessed online, and shared via URL.

Run an Accessibility Test

Our software is designed to meet WCAG 2.1 AA standards, and accessibility is one of the checks we run on our site-audit tool. That said, it doesn't hurt to run one last accessibility check using a third-party accessibility tool. It's rare, but occasionally small accessibility issues can pop up as you make content changes, and we can help you resolve those before you launch your catalog for the academic year.

If you’d like to learn more about catalog preparations or schedule a demo of our software, please reach out to us.