SiteImprove

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The University has contracted with an online service called SiteImprove, which crawls our website and finds broken links and possible misspelled words. We have set up the system so that it produces reports for each section of the site, which will be sent to the people responsible for the content of each sections roughly every five days. If you are one of those people, you will receive a regular email notification that will include a summary of the status of your site, with a link to log into the site and get more detailed information, as well as access to tools to fix problems. Here is a brief walk through of these resources:

1. You will receive a notification email when you are added to the system. You will need to log in and create a password for the system. The first time you log in, you will be presented with a tutorial video as an option to watch. It would be wise to spend the eight minutes it takes to watch the video so that you can get a general overview of how the system works. After you watch it, you can click a box to tell the system not to show you the video again. You can access it other ways later if you'd like.

2. When you log in, you will have a view like slide No. 1 to the right. The two most prominent features are large black and green circles. The black circle gives you the number of broken links on your site and the green circle tells you how many misspellings you have. To find out the details for each section, simply click on the appropriate circle.

3. When you click on the broken links circle, you will see a view similar to slide No. 2 at the right. This will show you each of the links that are broken, with an indication on the right of how many pages that link resides on. If you put your mouse over one of the links, you will see a few options for how to proceed.

  • The magnyifying glass on the left opens a separate page that is a report of problems on the page linking to that broken link.
  • The arrow pointing to the web page will take you to the broken link.
  • Click on View List to see the names of the pages that are impacted by the broken link. If you click on the arrow pointing to to the web page at the far right, it will open a new window or tab and take you to the page in question. There you can make any changes that are suggested by SiteImprove.

4. When you click on the misspellings circle, you will see a view similar to slide No. 3 at the right. This will show you each of the misspelled words, along with suggestions for proper spellings, and the number of pages it can be found on.

  • Sometimes the system will identify a word as being misspelled even when it isn't. To the right of the word is a plus sign and an "x". The plus sign adds the word to a dictionary for our site so that the next time the reportg runs, it will not think that it is misspelled. The "x" will ignore that word if found.
  • Otherwise, this works similar to the broken links section. Click on View List to see all pages where the word is misspelled and then, with your mouse over the link, click on the arrow pointing to the web page to go to nthe page and fix the problem.