This case study focuses on the management and organisational changes that have emerged in the time since Perth & Kinross Council started using Siteimprove services.
Background
Before the installation of their CMS in 2004, Tina Ho was the webmaster responsible for creating and maintaining all pages on the Perth & Kinross Council website. Tina continues to oversee the development of the website, but the management of web pages is now devolved to individual web teams who are responsible for pages serving key business areas within their own departments.
Although Tina knew the website was in the hands of able staff, she lacked an overview of the daily efforts required of these teams when addressing ongoing performance and maintenance issues. Tina sensed that the time-consuming job of maintaining such a devolved site was being superseded by other equally important website tasks.
Broken Links
The first Siteimprove service to which Tina subscribed was LinkCheck. Given the design of their new website and significant increase of published pages, Tina stated that "checking links manually would have been near impossible."
Tina was impressed at how quickly and easily she was able to fix all broken links using LinkCheck. Online reports clearly highlighted the precise location of the errors, both on a live page as well as in the source code.
By far the most beneficial aspect of the service for Tina was the time-saving management capability it offered. LinkCheck allowed her to divide the website into page groups such that custom email reports could be automatically generated for each department‘s web team. Team members were added as users to the online service and given restricted access to the sections under their responsibility.
The weekly LinkCheck reports provided Tina with not only a quick overview of the status of all links, but it also helped her to directly involve all departments in this key maintenance task. It also meant that the job could be accomplished in a fraction of the time, given that it was spread out over several team members. Most importantly, Tina confessed, "LinkCheck helps us to consistently maintain a low level of broken links before the public notices them!"
Website Statistics
Tina considered adding Siteimprove's hosted website statistic service, SiteAnalyze to their existing account due to the clear cost and usability advantages noted following a comparative trial. Tina was impressed with the many advantages found over their former provider of statistics, and was further convinced by the convenience of accessing both LinkCheck and SiteAnalyze within the same online platform.
Initial concerns about changing over to SiteAnalyze were that they would no longer have access to the statistical information from their previous supplier. However, faced with an ever growing stack of
advantages, it became clear that they would benefit tremendously by switching to SiteAnalyze. In Tina's own words, "We finally bit the bullet in 2007, and we haven't looked back since."
Similar to LinkCheck, SiteAnalyze allows for the creation of groups, whereby each web team receives a customised website usage report for their individual content areas. Previously, as Tina confessed, a half-day would be lost extracting the relevant information from their previous stats package! With the automatic scheduling feature offered by SiteAnalyze, reports may be scheduled to run at each department’s preferred interval, be it daily, weekly, or even monthly, which saves Tina even more time.
Last but not least, Tina was glad to discover that she could extend SiteAnalyze to the council's intranet, where previously no statistics were available.
SpellCheck / Accessibility
When Siteimprove introduced SiteCheck, bundling two new modules, SpellCheck and Accessibility, together with LinkCheck, Tina did not need much convincing to see the benefits of adding them to their existing service package.
Similar to LinkCheck, the SpellCheck module consolidates errors into efficient time-saving lists. Tina may choose to view pages with the most errors, or prioritise her time by fixing errors affecting the greatest number of pages in the "Frequent errors" list.
Once again, Tina took full advantage of the grouping feature to involve all web teams in these critical website maintenance tasks. Tina added, "Our teams have embraced these reports, allocating blocks of time in their daily routine to address misspellings and work toward a more compliant accessible website".
It's worth noting that Perth & Kinross Council was recently listed as one of only 37 Councils in the UK to achieve Level A compliance in Socitm's accessibility supplement to the Better Connected Report. Tina believes the accessibility module will be a great asset in helping the web team work toward achieving AA compliance in the future.
Website monitoring
Tina opted to switch to SiteAlarm, the website monitoring service provided by Siteimprove. The decision to cancel their subscription with a similar provider of website monitoring was based primarily on the convenience of dealing with a single supplier where all services can be accessed via a single online platform, avoiding multiple login names and passwords.
Conclusion
Tina and the Perth & Kinross Council website have benefited tremendously from the services provided by Siteimprove. With an organised and easy-to-access online platform at hand, the Perth & Kinross Council website is no longer dependent on time-consuming maintenance methods - or the public - to rectify errors spread across the website. Web teams operate proactively, managing their time more effectively, and focus their energy on future developments.
Epilogue
When asked why Tina would recommend Siteimprove’s services to other Webmasters she said it makes their job more organised and effective, freeing up time to focus on other key tasks relating to design and development.