UNBC website quality assurance with Siteimprove
The web team in Communications and Marketing has implemented a web governance tool at UNBC called Siteimprove. This tool assists in website quality assurance. Siteimprove is cloud-based software available to all UNBC web editors that helps facilitate the content auditing process.
Siteimprove reporting features
Each month you will receive an automated report that generates a Digital Certainty Index that measures the overall quality of the web pages in your section of the website. These reports will allow you to easily identify the following types of errors:
- Spelling mistakes
- Broken links in web pages and PDFs
- Broken image references
At the web administrator level, Siteimprove helps us maintain the website by finding content that should be updated or removed from the website, such as:
- Outdated contact information
- Personal ID numbers
- Site-wide department and employee name changes or removals
- Outdated documents
- Links to unsafe/malicious websites
From a more technical standpoint, some examples of how the web team uses Siteimprove are as follows:
- Identifying web accessibility issues for users with disabilities
- Search engine optimization
- Ensuring cross-browser and device compatibility
It’s important to recognize that we are not asking everybody to go through and conduct a thorough refresh of their websites. That is another process that we will be able to help with in the future. Rather, we hope people will take time to correct spelling errors, fix or remove broken links, delete content that is no longer relevant, and so on.
Signing in to Siteimprove
To sign in to Siteimprove, please visit the Siteimprove Sign-in page and sign in using your UNBC user ID and password. When you first sign in you won’t be assigned to a section right away. Please allow up to 2 days to view your reports as we have to assign you to your sections manually.
Learning how to use Siteimprove
To be successful, you will want to take approximately two to three hours of time to complete the training to learn how to use Siteimprove. Our web team will be available for support throughout the content auditing process. Our goal is to have this phase of the content auditing process completed by all web editors by July 31, 2020.
Please read through the Siteimprove training materials page and watch the Siteimprove Fundamentals on-demand webinar. Optionally, you can also watch the Siteimprove Accessibility 101 on-demand webinar to gain a greater understanding of how to improve the accessibility of your web pages for users with disabilities.
Once you have finished reviewing this content, please email lindsay.hastey@unbc.ca to confirm you have completed the training. Please feel free to include any feedback you have on the training materials or any questions you have about using Siteimprove.
We are looking forward to getting you going with Siteimprove; we are sure you will find this tool to be very helpful with maintaining your content on the UNBC website.
Thank you for your support in this project!