We hosted a Siteimprove training webinar!

Links for additional reading

Accessing Siteimprove

• Log in to Siteimprove using FIU SSO Credentials
• Getting our Cascade editors access to Siteimprove
• Finding QA and accessibility reports in Siteimprove

Finding broken links

• Reviewing potential broken links on Siteimprove
• How to Find and Fix Broken Links

Accessibility

• Accessibility page on Core Resource Hub
• Accessibility tag on Core Resources Blog

SEO

• SEO tag on Core Resources Blog

PDFs

• Accessible Documents: Ensuring Access for Everyone
• PDFs tag on Core Resources Blog

Siteimprove Policies

• How to create a policy on Siteimprove
• Siteimprove Policy Spotlight: Pitbull Stadium

View transcript

Transcript edited for brevity.

Brandon Cordova

Good morning, everyone.

I hope everyone's ready to learn some Siteimprove.

We're the Office of Digital Communications, and we'll be hosting this webinar. I'm sure many of you have worked with us already, but just to give a quick little refresher: we're responsible for most of the website management and website governance at FIU. We make websites, we manage them, we help you manage them.

With that in mind, I'm Brandon Cordova. I'm the content strategist for the Office of Digital Communications and assisting me, answering your questions in the Q&A and possibly jumping in depending on what your questions are, will be:

• Matthew González, Senior Director
• Christina Frith, Assistant Director

First things first, let's talk a bit about what Siteimprove is. Most of you probably have an idea, given that you signed up for this webinar. Siteimprove is basically an automated tool. "Automated" is the operative word here. It's a useful assistant for all you web managers. It automatically and periodically scans your websites for issues so you can fix them.

These can be issues like broken links, accessibility issues like missing alt text and usability issues like oversized images. We'll walk you through Siteimprove:

• What the different dashboards do
• How to find and fix issues
• How Siteimprove connects you to Cascade
• Creating Siteimprove policies

Policies are like creating your own audit rules for your website in order to accomplish some sort of task. We'll talk more about those later.

During this webinar, I'll be going through a lot of content rather quickly.

Keep in mind this meeting will be recorded and transcribed. We'll be sending out the recording to everyone afterward.

So, what is Siteimprove? We said it's an automated tool that helps you find issues. It's very, very useful and we always recommend you make it a regular part of your website management. It's a big part of our own pre- and post-launch checks. Whenever we're creating websites, the end of the process involves QA and accessibility checks. Siteimprove helps with those, as well as post-launch checks to keep up the quality of your website.

Regularly auditing your website for issues makes it easier to maintain because you're solving two or three Siteimprove issues per month as opposed to doing it every five years and having to fix 300 broken links in one session.

Why should you care? It's really easy to forget about post-launch audits. People think: "Okay, website's done. Don't have to worry about it ever again. All I have to do is make an edit every now and then." But, it's important to conduct these quality and accessibility audits.

First, it's the law. FIU has to comply with accessibility guidelines, so we have to comply with them. Second, many regulatory things like accreditation are tied to meeting accessibility guidelines.

Keep in mind our team is always here to help and offer friendly assistance. But, these things are mandatory. We have to make high-quality, accessible websites and make sure other people are maintaining high-quality, accessible websites. Luckily, good QA and good accessibility make good websites. In other words, it's the law to meet these guidelines, but your website will be better for it.

Something good to remember when talking about QA and accessibility is that the FIU template covers a lot of issues for you. If your site was migrated to Cascade or created on Cascade, our template already accounts for stuff like color contrast accessibility issues. It's baked in. Template updates by our team are universitywide and are often in response to new accessibility guidelines.

That means when new issues crop up, they're usually the result of new pages being created, pages being edited, that sort of thing—which is why it's important to regularly audit your content!

A quick note: Siteimprove works for all websites. I keep talking about Cascade because that's what most websites at FIU are on, but if you have a website that's not on Cascade and want to audit it with Siteimprove, just let us know, and we'll help you through that process. It will work a little different, but it's still super useful.

Okay, so let's get started with the actual demo. I'm going to share my screen real quick so you can all see what I'm doing. First things first is I'm going to walk you through the actual dashboards. It's the main view you're probably going to be using with Siteimprove.

You can access Siteimprove via siteimprove.fiu.edu, which will take you to our single sign-on. Once you log in, you'll see the main page that has all the dashboards. I'll show you how these different dashboard components work.

First, you have to find your site. We obviously have access to a gazillion websites because our office administrates the system. You will most likely see one, a handful at most. Click All Sites and it'll give you all the sites that you're currently managing.

Select your site and you'll see the Dashboards screen. The sidebar has all the dashboards we'll be working with today. For this demonstration, we'll be using our team's Core Resource site.

What you'll see first is the full site, like Core Resources, Medicine, or Nursing. Then, we have things called Groups. Groups take a slice of your website and separate them into a specific group of pages. This is helpful for managing massive websites or when you have a lot of editors working on different sections. Groups are not enabled by default, but if you're interested in using them for your site, just reach out to us and we'll help you get set up.

Back to our main site. I'm going to walk you through all the actual dashboards. When you open up the Dashboards screen, you'll see four of them. The DCI score, Quality Assurance, Accessibility, and SEO. You'll also see little sub-items like analytics and Policies, which we'll talk about later. This view is what you'll mainly be working with as a website manager. The dashboards work on a score system. The higher the number, the better—100 being a perfect website free of errors. If the number drops, you know there's new issues occurring on your website.

To start with Quality Assurance. QA refers to stuff breaking your website and making it less usable, like broken links. Broken links are the most common QA issue. You link to an article on your website, it gets taken down and now your users are clicking on a dead page. If it happens often enough, your QA score will begin to drop. Sometimes, the drop is huge, because you might have the same broken link on a lot of pages.

Accessibility is stuff preventing your website's access from being universal. These are things like obstacles to screen readers, color contrast issues. I want to reiterate, following accessibility guidelines is the law. Luckily for us, the template does a lot of the work for us.

Then there's SEO. This is stuff affecting search visibility. If you're familiar with the marketing side of your website, you'll know all about these issues: text that's too long, oversized images, lack of meta descriptions. We're not going to cover SEO too much, but I might give it a nod later in this webinar.

Finally, DCI. DCI is just a combination of the other dashboards. It's a good summary for when you're trying to smash through a lot of issues in one big audit.

Generally, fixing issues in one dashboard will fix the issue in another dashboard. For example, fixing a broken link will improve your QA score and your SEO score. That's why it's good to stay on top of all your dashboards, because issues affect many aspects of your website.

Now I'm going to walk you through the actual dashboard. We have the score, like I mentioned, and it breaks down into sections summarizing different problems. The real thing that's helpful, though, is the Issues list. It'll give you a summary of all the issues affecting your website: broken links, oversized images, misspellings.

However, remember this is an automated tool. It'll be working off a set dictionary and guidelines. Some issues are always issues, like broken links. Some issues may not apply to your unit, like misspellings, which are flagged when you do things like use acronyms.

Let's click into Broken Links, which are always 100% relevant. You'll notice the dashboard's sidebar has a lot of helpful tabs. Issues will be the main one you're working with and within Issues you'll see Broken Links. This is the list of actual links that are broken. It'll flag the broken link and tell you what pages it is used on. Alternatively, you can use the Pages with Broken Links list, which focuses on the pages that have broken links rather than the broken links themselves.

Depending on your issue, you can use either view. If one broken link appears on many pages, the Broken Links list will be more helpful. Whereas if you have a lot of broken links on a smaller number of pages, the page-by-page breakdown will be more helpful.

I'll walk you through the Page Report. When you click a page from either the Broken Links list or the Pages with Broken Links list, you'll see the Page Report. It's a full report of all the issues on a particular page. If you look at the tabs at the top, you can see it has panels corresponding to each dashboard. The Page Report will list out Occurrences for each particular issue. If you click the issue, like a broken link, it will highlight it on the page.

Now that you know where the broken link is, it's time to fix it. There are buttons at the top: the page URL which shows you the live page, a page check to re-audit the page, and one labeled CMS. The CMS button opens the page directly in Cascade, if your site is on Cascade. I won't show you how to fix this specific issue, but just know you can click the occurrence to see where it is, click the CMS button to open the page on Cascade, then you can edit the page like you would in any other instance.

Once the issue is fixed, publish the page (the Page Report only scans what's visible on the live site). Then, click Run Page Check, denoted by the little circular symbol. It'll check the page again and, if you fixed it properly, clear the Occurrence of the issue. You can also clear the issue and just wait for Siteimprove to scan your site during its next cycle. Siteimprove will run a full audit of your site about every five to seven days.

That's how to fix a broken link, but notice there's multiple issues on this page we're using as an example. The "broken" network.fiu.edu link is one we want to focus on shortly. One more thing, issues are sometimes not visible to the naked eye. They might be hidden in the HTML. A good example of that is when links are deleted using Backspace or Delete in the text editor; they might leave behind a broken link with no text. When that happens, you can use the HTML view of your website to find it. That's a little more advanced, so feel free to reach out to us if you need any help with that.

Besides the Page Report, there's also the Broken Links list. This is particularly helpful when you have a small number of broken links on many pages. In that case, it might be easier to try and fix the issue through the link list. Beyond fixing the issue, it can also help you test whether a link is actually broken. For that, we need to link at the Broken Links section and it's three tabs.

The first tab is Confirmed Broken Links. These are links that are 100% broken, no question. The link is returning a Page Not Found error, or "404" in our parlance. The second tab is Links to Review. These are issues returning error codes other than 404. These error codes might still mean the link is broken, like a 408 error which means it's taking too long to load. On the other hand, the link might be perfectly fine, like with some 503 errors, which can result from a website blocking Siteimprove but not actual users. Finding that out is your job. To do that, just click the link!

Once you've figured out whether the link is broken or working, you can look at the two buttons Confirm and Dismiss. The Confirm button tells Siteimprove the link is actually broken and to add it to the Confirmed Broken Links tab. The Dismiss button tells Siteimprove the link is working and to stop flagging it as an issue.

Using network.fiu.edu as an example, we know the link is working, so let's click Dismiss. There are two options: Dismiss For Now and Dismiss Forever. You always want to use For Now, because dismissing forever means Siteimprove will not flag the link if it ever does break in the future. It helps to write a little note like "Link working as of June 23, 2026" to let your team know why it's dismissed.

When a link is dismissed, it no longer appears on the broken links or issues list. Instead, it gets sent to the third tab, Dismissed Links. You can always go to the Dismissed Links tab to double-check if you accidentally dismissed something that's broken. If that's the case, just click Undo and it'll put the link back in the Links to Review tab.

Let's move on to some of the other dashboards which work in pretty much the same way as Quality Assurance, just with different items. Accessibility looks a little different, with different issues highlighted in its own lists. The biggest benefit of Siteimprove's Accessibility dashboard is that it summarizes WCAG guidelines.

WCAG guidelines govern what accessibility standards we need to meet and the list is huge and very comprehensive. Siteimprove boils the information down to a useful summary of issues on your site. You can click through the different flagged issues and read blurbs on what they are and how to fix them. It isn't that different from Quality Assurance. The only thing you'll need to look out for is these little codes: A, AA, AAA, and S (S refers to Siteimprove's own best practices), referring to different levels of compliance.

The minimum standard for FIU websites is AA compliance, but we always strive for AAA compliance whenever possible. To simplify, more A's means a more difficult issue to fix, but less A's means greater barriers to accessibility. Just like quality Assurance, you can look at the big list of issues and run through Page Reports to correct them on your pages. Fix the issue, Publish, run or wait for a Page Check. Done! Remember, accessibility is about universal access, so more accessible websites benefit everyone.

One of the issues in the Accessibility dashboard is PDFs. Let's talk about PDFs. Long story short: PDFs are on their way out. They are no longer considered accessible according to national standards. They will be gradually phased out in the next few years. So, one of the things we've been encouraging is for units to stop using PDFs whenever possible. I'll go ahead and say that a lot of PDFs are not necessary. Little event flyers or one-page handouts can and shouldn't be on your website. Feel free to use those things for printable material or marketing, but they should not be on your website as PDFs that are the only source of information.

And look, we get it. There's no perfect solution. You can't put a 500-page employee handbook as text on your website. We just ask you avoid using PDFs whenever possible. Try to put their information on your website. If you have to use PDFs, then at least make sure they're accessible using Siteimprove's PDF validation tool.

I'll walk you through these PDF tools. As you can see, it's right under issues in the Accessibility dashboard. here are two tools. The PDF audit shows you all PDFs that currently exist on your website. Ours is blank, because we're pretty good about omitting them. Note that this PDF list only refers to what's hosted on your website. If you link off to another website, Siteimprove won't catch that.

The list will give you information about your PDF and what accessibility standards it's failing. The most common issue is machine-readable text. This issue means screen readers cannot read the text on your PDF. That might happen because the text on the PDF is an image or it's broken up into too many separate lines. A sentence that drops down to three or four lines, will instead be read as three or four broken strings of text, instead of one cohesive sentence.

Keep in mind these are serious accessibility issues. And they're the reason that we're trying to kind of push people away from PDFs. It's very difficult to go back and fix 500 PDFs or make 500 PDFs fully accessible. Again, we encourage you to avoid them when possible.

If you want to make your PDFs accessible, it's a thorough process. Siteimprove has a PDF Validate tool that can help. Not everyone has access to it, but we're working on that. The tool lets you upload PDFs to check what accessibility issues they have. As you can see in this example, my uploaded PDF has machine-readable text, but it isn't tagged as a PDF. These little things add up to make PDFs very inaccessible.

Something important to keep in mind is that our template fixes a lot of accessibility issues, but it can't do anything about your PDFs. You have to work very hard to make them accessible. There's a lot of room to make mistakes and break guidelines. It's why we encourage you not to use them. If you do have to use them, use tools like Siteimprove PDF Validate and Acrobat to make them as accessible as possible.

We have a bit of time so let me show you a bit of the SEO dashboard. I won't talk too much because it's roughly the same as the other dashboards. There's an Issues list, a score and categories of things to resolve. It has Page Reports and whatnot just like the other dashboards. Super straightforward.

The last thing I'll show you is Policies, which a lot of people ask about. Siteimprove has all these preset issues, like Broken Links. Policies are like creating your own rules to have flagged as issues. One of the most useful ways you can use policies on your website is finding content. You can give Siteimprove a set of rules, like showing you pages where a string of text appears. When Riccardo Silva Stadium was renamed Pitbull Stadium, we used a policy to find every instance of the old name to update it.

The policies can be made and updated on the fly, too. Let's say the stadium is no longer Pitbull Stadium and is now some other thing. No problem, just make a Siteimprove policy for "Pitbull Stadium" and it will show you every time that new name appears.

Let's make a new policy. Go to the Policies section and click Create Policy. You can tell Siteimprove what kind of policy you want to make. A Content Policy refers to content, like words, phrases, etc. Just Add a Rule and specify what you're looking for. It can be plain, visible text, or you can search for things specifically in the HTML. Content Match is the easiest and probably the one you'll be using.

I'll type in "Pitbull Stadium" and then click the site I want the policy to apply to: Core Resource Hub. I'll name it Pitbull Stadium Test. You can also add a description, like "Test for Siteimprove Webinar." Once you create the policy, it'll run a check for your website, finding exactly what you told it to find in the policy rules. Then, it works just like the Dashboards. It'll flag the content and mark it as an issue that needs to be resolved. Fix it like you would any other issue and you're done!

As I said, this is super helpful for finding things like words and phrases, like old names of departments after name changes, or personnel that have moved units or received promotions. A policy can help you find the sometimes hundreds of instances of this person or that location, instead of having to manually search for them.

You can also find other things, like particular document formats. If Microsoft Word told us tomorrow that .docx files are no longer going to be used, you can search for .docx files using a policy. You can tell Siteimprove to show you all images over 1 MB, to scale them down and improve optimization. Lots of possibilities once you're familiar with policies. We have some documentation on how to create them, but feel free to reach out to us if you ever need help.

We're in the final stretch here, so I want to give a last word on our role as web editors and why we're holding this webinar. The most important thing about this role is knowing that websites are an active responsibility.

Once a website is launched, it doesn't mean our job is done. We need to continue maintaining them and there are always going to be new issues and new accessibility guidelines to meet. Siteimprove makes that maintenance so much easier. Keeping up with regular site audits means less work down the road.

Don't neglect Siteimprove's automated help! It provides regular accessibility and usability reports to your email. Those things are important. If we ignore them, it turns a small audit every few weeks into a massive audit at the end of the year. Before you know it, it's the end of the fiscal year and we're scrambling because we have 100 accessibility issues that could affect our accreditation. Don't let that list get to 100; take some time every week, every two weeks, every month to walk yourself through Siteimprove's issue list. It's a lot easier to deal with three issues than 300.

And I'm sure a handful of us here have had that kind of responsibility sprung on us. Hey, you're the new website manager. You check Siteimprove and there's 500 things that need correcting. It can be tedious, easier to miss things, and just a difficult task to fold into our other job responsibilities once it gets to that point. So, keep up with your maintenance!

One last little thing, a bit of housekeeping: our next big WordsAhead item will be a Cascade training. We'll be running a survey soon for you to tell us what you hope to see from the training. So, be on the lookout for that and, you know, get excited.

And that's all for today's webinar unless, Matthew, do you have anything to jump in and add?

Matthew Gonzalez

Well, first, I want to say great job, Brandon. Thank you for running us through Siteimprove. I was able to put in a number of resources in the chat ("Links for additional reading" listed above). A couple of things that you said "I wasn't sure if we have documentation," I think we did pretty good. We were able to find plenty of posts, especially about policies.

Brandon, I thought it'd be a good idea to talk a little bit more about some of the things that are automated in Siteimprove and some of the things that require us to go in and make sure what Siteimprove found was correct. For example, the "Heading is not descriptive" error that was brought to our attention recently.

Brandon Cordova

That's a good example. We just wrote a blog post about that, right? Super cool.

This issue is kind of like the unconfirmed broken links in QA. Siteimprove can sometimes return false positives, where an accessibility issue is flagged and drops your site's score, but doesn't actually impact accessibility. The "Heading is not descriptive" issue is a AA accessibility issue that can have significant, negative impacts on your score. It often occurs on a lot of pages at once. When an issue appears on many pages at one time, it's usually the result of a link breaking, new guidelines or a false positive, so it's good to check.

The heading issue we mentioned appeared on a lot of people's pages recently. People were seeing it on their dashboard and asked us about it. What we found was that the flagged pages did have headings. For example, a program page called "Ph.D. in English" was flagged, when that heading is obviously description.

If you know that an accessibility issue is a false positive, you can dismiss it like a broken link. There's an additional box that appears where you can provide a description describing the false positive and clear it from your dashboard.

Matthew Gonzalez

Cool. We got a question from Wendy in the chat just now that probably hits everybody looking into this process.

"Is 100% compliance attainable?"

Anybody that works in compliance knows that things run on a sliding scale. 100% is attainable, but it's difficult. You can get close, but you might struggle with the last 1% or so. It goes back to what Brandon was talking about regarding Siteimprove's manual testing versus automated testing, and your ability to go in and mark issues are confirmed or dismissed.

But, as long as you're putting in that good-faith effort, you're as close to 100% as possible, then you're okay. Those last couple percent, anything you're running into that you feel like is blocking you from getting that 100%, just reach out to us and we can help.

And that's really the case with all this stuff, right? DigiComm's here, you had to run projects with us and all that. But in the end, we're kind of the underbelly of making sure we're reaching accessibility compliance on our websites. We can help through a lot of these problems.

You're probably not the first person to have this issue. Going over to the Core Resources Blog is a good place to look, because when we find common issues, we'll write about them, like the heading issue. Short answer is: yes, 100% is attainable. You might run into roadblocks, but we're here to help if you can't get there.

Brandon Cordova

Yeah, and when you go into the Accessibility dashboard, it has those different levels of compliance. Some of those AAA issues can be very complex and more of an aspiration for our team. That being said, always aim for AAA and make sure the A and AA issues are 100% dealt with. We may not reach 100% compliance, but we do want to reach 100% compliance with A and AA issues.

Matthew Gonzalez

Yeah, that's such a great distinction and I should have mentioned. So, the AAA stuff might keep you from 100%, but in the dashboard you'll see A and AA have their own meters. Those need to be at 100%. And they build on each other, right? Single A is the bedrock, AA builds onto single A, and the AAA stuff is aspirational.

As most of you know, because I think this is our third event we've put together, we're trying to do as many of these as we can. We're really trying to reach out to all web editors. In the end, the goal is trying to stay compliant—not just with accessibility, but also the Digital Communication Standards Policy. This policy lays out the guidelines for what it means to be a compliant FIU website. And, as we always do, we're trying to help you guys stay compliant.

Okay, I see one question here: "One of the issues on our site is mobile speed. How can we fix that?"

So, there's a couple things going on. Mobile speed is a tough standard. If I have any developers out there, they know what it means to work with Google's Lighthouse and all the different things Google wants to ding you for. Your page being slow and a lot of that stuff is Google products, like Analytics, Tag Manager, YouTube. And so you'll get these notices that say your page speed is being affected, when it's just a YouTube video.

There are some things you can do. You can keep your images as small as possible. We have a blog post about image optimization, just a super basic standard of keeping images under 1 MB, but 1 MB is huge for an image. It's the kind of thing where you open your browser, hit the little magnifying glass and get right into someone's pores. Check our best practices for images and we have a list of sizes for all images we recommend. Those sizes take into account retina display and that kind of thing to make sure your images stay crisp.

That's a big part of the mobile speed issue. There are some other things too, like adding lazy loading to embedded YouTube or Vimeo videos. If you're interested in more on that, we could probably put together a blog post that specifically calls out mobile speed issues you can fix.

The rest is some stuff that's baked into the template. Anecdotally, I think you guys know that sites using Cascade are pretty fast. And if you're running into something that feels like it's slowing down your website, it's probably not on Cascade and you should definitely reach out to DigiComm at digimaint@fiu.edu or start a project to get you moved onto Cascade.

If you're interested in staying up to date with these trainings and you're not in the FIU Digital Teams chat, go to core.fiu.edu, go down to the footer, and there's a link to join the FIU Digital channel on Microsoft Teams. That's where we do a lot of outreach. We also send some emails; you've definitely gotten an email for this event.

But, if you want to get midweek updates and follow our polls, then the FIU Digital team is the place to go. It's also the first place we'll share the Cascade training survey we mentioned earlier. We really want to make sure it's tailored to the folks sitting in on it. We have hundreds of users in Cascade, so we just need to figure out where you are and make sure we're presenting information in the best way possible, whether that's a two-hour workshop or a webinar like this one. It'll probably be the biggest and most important training we do in the Fall.

Well, with that I think Brandon can sign us off.

Brandon Cordova

Yes, thank you very much for joining us. It was nice seeing everyone here, all the content and word and web smiths at the university. Looking forward to seeing what you guys do on Siteimprove.

As always, if you have any questions, please send us an email at digimaint@fiu.edu. We're always here to help!

Nice seeing all of you and bye bye!