A new tool is helping the CATS Web Office greatly enhance the user experience of Eastern Illinois University’s website by dramatically reducing instances of broken links and typos/misspellings across the site.
Late in the Fall 2014 semester, the office began using SiteImprove, a web-based web governance software that periodically scans each page of the university’s website. From each scan, a database is compiled with the location of each non-working link on each page of the site along with misspelled – or potentially misspelled – words.
Additionally, administrators of EIU’s SiteImprove account can enter specific words or terms it would like the software to flag down; for example, the software can find all instances of the word “dorm” and allows users to quickly locate them and change them to “residence hall”.
Certain “top level” pages on Eastern’s site that have proven to draw the most user traffic can also be designated so that a quick check of the software’s web interface can verify that none of these pages contains any major problems.
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| Screenshot of SiteImprove |
“Since we first began working with the SiteImprove software in mid-October, we’ve been able to cut the dead links on Eastern’s website by over 80 percent,” said Dustin White, the web specialist doing a bulk of the work with the new software. “In addition, we’ve found and fixed nearly half of the misspelled words on the site.”
White says there are well over 8,000 pages on Eastern’s site, so tracking down and fixing such a huge percentage of these errors in such a short period of time would have been more or less impossible without SiteImprove.
“We’re continuing to work toward shrinking that number even more, although you’re always going to have a handful of dead links,” added White. “That’s just the nature of having such a massive site. The important thing is now we have a good way to find and fix them in a timely manner.”
In the future, individual offices and departments should be able to begin receiving reports on just their own websites. With this, they can either be assured of the quality of their site’s content or be aware of pages that need immediate attention.
“This tool has proven to be quite valuable,” said Web Office Director Ryan Gibson. “It creates a better experience for users and saves our office a tremendous amount of time tracking down dead links.”
For more information contact Ryan Gibson via email: rwgibson@eiu.edu.
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