This document summarizes the results of a university website study and provides tips for ensuring website quality. The study found an average of 97 misspellings and broken links on over 2,000 pages across 25 university websites. One in five students will not consider a school due to a bad website experience. To improve, the document recommends using tools to automate link checking, spelling checks, and accessibility tests to identify and fix errors. This helps websites run better, improves credibility and SEO, and creates a better experience for students.

1. Content Put to the Test
How to be sure you put your best foot forward on the web.

2. Today’s Focus
• How Website Errors Affect your Organization
• Review University Web Study Results
• Tips & Tricks

3. Siteimprove
Brian Stewart
Senior Account Executive
bst@siteimprove.com
612.208.0743

4. Negative Affects Errors Have
• Time wasted (receiving emails, or calls)
• School loses credibility
• SEO is effected
• Accessibility

5. Is Tuition important to your school?
One in five students said they removed a school
from consideration because of a bad experience
on an institution's Web site.
- Noel-Levitz, LLC.

6. University Web Study
• Average number of broken links per school
• Average amount of misspellings & most
common misspellings
• Common accessibility issues

7. University Web Study
• Intent: It’s a common problem & there are
ways you can improve your website
• Who was included: 25 Public Universities
• Total Pages Checked: 2,000

8. University Web Study

10. Best Practice for Checking Links and the Tools
• Use a link checking tool that tests both internal and external links
• Run the check from the public domain
(if it’s a public site)
• Setup an automated schedule
• Confirm the tool checks the entire HTML source code
• Make sure it’s easy to use and locates exactly where the broken link
or image is
• Confirm the tool detects errors for all status codes, not just 404’s

11. Where to start?
Which pages are viewed most!
Stop chasing your tail!

12. Mispeling Results
97
Average # of
unique misspellings
Most Common Misspellings:
•
Enivronmental
•
Commitee
•
Addtional
•
Oportunities
•
Technolgy

13. Best Practices when
checking for misspellings
• Use a spell check tool that has the ability to
add words to the dictionary

14. Why?
• People won’t use it if it’s not dependable
Spell Check the entire HTML
Why? You will not be able to ensure titles,
menus, dropdowns, etc. have
been checked

15. Accessibility Results
• Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) States:
All images should have an alternative text associated
with them.
• What are alt tags? These help identify what’s
happening in the image as opposed to
“group photo.jpg”

16. Accessibility Results
20 of the 25 websites were
missing the ALT-tag on more than
100 images

17. Accessibility Best Practices
for Content Contributors
• Photos: Make sure all photos have a descriptive alt tag
• Headings: Utilize proper heading structure [<h1, <h2, etc…]
These act as maps for the screen reader & will allow
the user to skip sections they aren’t interested in
• Links: Utilize title attributes on links, Titles act like
alt tags on images

18. Tools to Consider
• Siteimprove: Quality Assurance, Accessibility, SEO, Analytics & Website Monitoring
• SortSite: Broken links, browser code compatibility, search engine optimization and other usability issues
• HiSoftware: Provides automated content compliance solutions to analyze content contributions for
compliance issues
• Rex Swain's HTTP Viewer: See exactly what an HTTP request returns to your browser [free online]
• W3C: SpellCheck, Link Check, Accessibility Check [free online]
• Check Dog: Link and Spell Checking
• Xenu Link Sleuth: A free multi-threaded link checking
• InSpyder: Link and Spelling

19. Siteimprove
Brian Stewart
Senior Account Executive
bst@siteimprove.com
612.208.0743