Siteimprove is rapidly becoming a household name among educational organisations across the UK.
When web professionals see how much time and work can be saved with products like SiteCheck, they cannot wait to recommend the products to their colleagues, so that they also can benefit from this.
Have a read and see how the University of Brighton did it.
Background
The University of Brighton became a Siteimprove customer in June 2009. The University uses SiteCheck which monitors their site for broken links, spelling errors and accessibility issues. To further improve their web management the University also uses SiteAlarm which alerts them if the site goes down and measures the responsiveness of the home page.
Like many people Stuart Elliot, Web Development officer at Brighton, had tools in place to assist him with broken links and was therefore in his words slightly sceptical about using a paid for service to monitor our website.
Stuart was using Google Webmaster tools, yet after a detailed explanation and the offer of a free 14 day trial Stuart was pleased to review SiteCheck in more detail. Thankfully I took a demo of the Siteimprove product and quickly realised that the system had a lot more to offer.
How has your experience of using SiteCheck been so far?
I have been very impressed by not only the information available (the spell checking function has proved very, very useful) but the ease of use. The ability to see the errors on the page are great for our content editors, and from my perspective quickly being able to preview the offending code is a real time saver.
As mentioned Stuart was already using tools prior to discovering SiteCheck, however these were not automated checkers like SiteCheck so as an example it was a case of When I get a chance I review the broken links on the site. So having that up to date information readily available from SiteCheck was a great help.
The University was able to take advantage of SiteCheck’s comprehensive Spell Checker. As you can see from image 1 on the next page, the University has many languages appearing on their site. SiteCheck’s Spell Checker is able to pick these up and has a dictionary available for each of the languages.
What would you say is your favourite SiteCheck feature?
The ability to set up groups dividing the site up into more manageable chunks was a huge help to Brighton University.
We manage a very large site with many microsites hanging off it and the ability to group parts of the site off and provide different levels of user access has proved invaluable (see image 2 on the next page). This alone was a compelling reason to use the product. Coupled with the workflow management which uses to-do lists and the ability for administrators to set tasks for other users it became clear it was a very powerful tool.
What impact has SiteCheck had on your website?
At the end of the day, not only is Siteimprove saving us time, it is also improving the quality of our website for a very competitive price, so all in all it’s a win-win for us!