Overview
Your content is a direct representation of your organisation, so it is crucial you know exactly what you are presenting online. Most large organisations like; Universities and Multinationals can have dozens, even hundreds of websites that they are unaware of. Often these old websites are not compliant with brand, security and regulatory guidelines like privacy and accessibility for compliance. Take control of your full web estate and ensure your users get the experience you want from your websites with Little Forest Domain Discovery.
Horizontal Domains
As part of the Little Forest Governance service we can perform a complete audit on all your domains. We start with a horizontal domain audit which looks for all the unique domains owned by your organisation, for example “yourwebsite.com” and “yourwebsite.co.uk”, which are both registered in the Whois database to you.
Vertical Domains
Once we have found all of your horizontal domains we audit each one to find all the vertical subdomains each has, for example “yourwebsite.com” and “test.yourwebsite.com”.
We use a variety of sources to ensure we find as many subdomains as possible, including; search engines, DNS Records, SSL Certificate data.
Alongside our search results you can also import any pre-existing domains and data from any spreadsheets you may have put together internally.
Your Domain Registry
Having a centralised domain registry is critical for any organisation to have full visibility and control of their web estate. Alongside a list of the domains you can start organising by assigning; site owners, faculties or business areas. You can categorise them by CMS or host so you have a complete record of infrastructure. You can also mark sites which need to be updated or decommissioned using Little Forest notes. Status codes and governance insights from the platform can help you decide which sites need to be closed down and which need prioritisation.
Ownership
Mark each domain with a site owner so you know exactly who is responsible for each website or who to contact in the event of an issue. It’s also key for those sites which may have slipped through the net, as it means they are put back on the radar and are actively being held responsible for. With legislation like WCAG accessibility all of the sites in your organisation are required to be compliant, not just the main site so assigning site owners to manage implementation is imperative to meeting those requirements.
Email Search
To help you accurately define your site owners the Little Forest platform will scan your site for an email on the domains landing page. This may give you the site owner itself which is great or it will give you a starting point of who you can contact in order to find who is. Saving you time manually searching each site and inputting each email into your registry.
SSL Certificates
Never miss an SSL certificate renewal deadline with the domain discovery report. Little Forests automated reporting provides you with all the certificate data we can grab from your sites including; Issuer, Protocol, Subject Name, Valid From and To Dates, Security settings and more.
HTTP Security Headers
Security headers help prevent various types of attacks, such as cross-site scripting (XSS), clickjacking, and data injection. By having a comprehensive report, your organisation can identify potential vulnerabilities in the security headers and take corrective actions to mitigate them.
Technology Registry
Knowing which sites you have and their status’s codes is a great starting point but to have a truly useful Domain Registry there are lots more pieces of key information which are important to collect in order to help the site owners. Little Forest helps by automating as much of this as possible. We scan each site to look for the key technologies on the sites. From the CMS and Operating System used to the Analytics technologies present on the site, giving you a clear image of your web estates infrastructure.
Google Lighthouse
The Google Lighthouse integration scans the landing page of each domain’s homepage to give you a snapshot of the quality. It has audits for performance, accessibility, SEO, Best Practices and more. This way you can quickly look across the condition of the whole web estate, highlighting any sites below compliance level and helping you decide where to prioritise resources.
Code Search Columns
The Code Search is one of the most popular features in the Little Forest platform and is now available for the Domain Registry. You can use it to search each domain’s landing page for keywords, phrases or components including; HTML, CSS and JAVASCRIPT. Simply use the settings to create a custom column and then input your search term e.g. ‘accessibility policy’ and run. Once it has run the report will confirm for each domain whether the search term was present or not. Set up as many searches as you need and re-run as often as required to see when changes have been made.
Customisable Columns & Views
There is no exact formula to having the perfect out of the box Domain Registry which is why alongside all the above features we also offer custom columns and views so you can structure everything around the needs of your organisation and users. Create columns with custom titles and input values including; colour coded options and drop-downs curated by you. Need more? You can also create custom views for different teams. This way they can focus on the sites which are most important to them.
Domain Discovery Alerting & Tracking
Get notified as soon as a new domain is set-up under your subdomain or is registered to your organisation. Monitor which sites are not performing as expected and get alerted when a site is not responding.
Schedule and run the reporting regularly across all of your sites to understand their quality, performance and accessibility levels over time.
You can track any update made and see a version history of the site with each scan saving a snapshot in time for you to refer back to in the future.
Small but mighty, this feature won an award within its first year of release. A domain registry you can be proud of.
