Siteimprove

Get Help Maintaining Your Pages

The College subscribes to Siteimprove to help monitor and maintain the quality of our websites. We use the service for sites on the grinnell.edu domain, including the main public site, our WordPress sites, Pioneer athletics and Alumni.

All Drupal editors are automatically enrolled. If you are not a Drupal editor, you can create an account by loggin in using your Grinnell College credentials. Then contact Communications and Marketing or, if your website is on sites.grinnell.edu, Mo Pelzel, to have us give you access to your website reports and dashboards.

Log in to Siteimprove

Siteimprove checks our sites every 4 days and can identify where you may have issues such as:

  • broken links or links to unsafe domains
  • misspelled words
  • violations of our style guide or words we want to avoid
  • improper use of headings
  • missing alt text on images
  • content that is not accessible to people with disabilities

In addition, you can use the analytics to track how much traffic your pages get, use policies to find content that matches certain criteria (useful if, for example, your department changes its name), and more.

Siteimprove provides customizable dashboards and reports that you can schedule so you can find the information you're most interested in the way that suits you best.

Siteimprove Basics

Siteimprove Training and Help

Siteimprove provides online help, getting started videos, and other training options, all found through the Help Center.

From the help center, you can also ask questions of Siteimprove representatives. 

Contact Communications and Marketing or Donna Dralus if you have specific questions, aren’t getting the reports you’d like to get, or want someone added to Siteimprove.

Although we don't offer classes on using the tools, we can answer questions and we’ll try to help you with anything that comes up.

Frequently Used Pages in Siteimprove

When you log into Siteimprove, you'll start at a dashboard. From there, you can navigate to find extra tools, locate exactly where a broken link or misspelling appears, and link directly to our site to help you make changes.

Some frequently used reports and where to find them:

  • Quality Assurance > Links > Broken Links or Pages with Broken Links
  • Quality Assurance > Spelling > Find Misspellings or Pages with Misspellings...
  • Quality Assurance > Spelling > Word Inventory (good if you want to find anyplace a particular word appears)
  • Quality Assurance > Inventory > Links (good if you want to find links to a page you're planning on getting rid of)

Quick Tips

Remember, you're smarter than Siteimprove! The reports can only point out potential issues. You'll need to review the items to figure out the best way to handle them.

The instructions in this section assume basic knowledge of Siteimprove and how it works and are written specifically for our Drupal editors, but may be applicable to others.

  • When reviewing a page in Siteimprove reports, click the page title/URL to see the page’s report or open the page itself.
     
  • To edit a node or profile, click the CMS button, which may appear in various places (like on the same line in a report or near the top of the page for an inspection report about a single page).
     
A white rectangle that displays a white S on a blue circle on top and a white number on a red button at the bottom
Siteimprove quick access from Drupal
  • You can also find a small widget when you are viewing some pages on our website. It appears on the right side with a Siteimprove icon (a blue circle with a white "S") and a white number in a red circle. Click on this to see issues that Siteimprove has flagged for the page you're viewing. 

When you are checking broken links reported by Siteimprove, always click the link to see if it is broken for you.

  • If so,
    • Replace the link with a new link, if possible.
    • If the information is no longer available on the web, remove the link. Reword the text if needed.
  • If the link works for you,
    • Ignore the link the first time it shows up. A number of problems may cause links to be temporarily broken.
    • If the link continues to show up as broken in subsequent reports and it continues to work for you, it may be a site that blocks bots. You can tell Siteimprove to (dismiss) the broken link or let us know and we can do it for you.

To Tell Siteimprove to Ignore (Dismiss) a Link

  1. Log on to Siteimprove, then go to Main Menu > Quality Assurance > Links > Broken Links. You can find links that require manual checks under Needs Review.
  2. Dismiss the link.
    • Dismissing for now it means the link will not be reported unless the status code changes. This is the best option, since it will usually keep the link off your report but still let you know if something changes.
    • Dismissing forever means the link won’t appear on the report again, even if they break for good, so you will have to check the link.

You can access a tutorial by clicking on the help icon towards the bottom of the screen.

You should rarely if ever see an Unsafe Domain error on the Drupal site; we fix these as soon as we see them. However, if you ever do, please bring it to our attention immediately.

 

If Siteimprove doesn't recognize a word as correct, it reports it as either:

  • A misspelled word — a word that has been confirmed as a misspelling.
    • Siteimprove marks a word as a misspelling by comparing it to a default dictionary of commonly misspelled words
    • We can also indicate common misspellings of words we use a lot, such as a common misspelling of a professor's name.
    • You can usually find the correct spelling through Siteimprove.
  • A potentially misspelled word — the word is not in the dictionary Siteimprove uses, and has not been confirmed as a misspelling.

Words may be marked this way for several reasons:

  • The word is really, honestly not spelled correctly. Solution: Correct the spelling.
  • The word is not spelled correctly for Grinnell. For example, we use theatre, not theater. Solution: Correct the spelling.
  • The word uses a non-standard spelling (and Grinnell doesn't). Solution: Correct the spelling.
  • The word is a proper noun, spelled correctly. Solution: Tell Siteimprove to "ignore on this page."
  • The word is in a foreign language and is spelled correctly. Solution: Tell Siteimprove to "ignore on this page." Check the page to make sure the word is marked to show the correct language. See “Set Language” on WYSIWYG Editors.
  • The word is part of a quote of written material, and that's the way the original author spelled it. Solution: Tell Siteimprove to "ignore on this page." If the spelling is an actual error, you can add [sic] after it to indicate that the original text had the error. Contact Communications if you have questions.

WARNING: Please do not ever tell Siteimprove to "add to dictionary" or "ignore on all pages" without talking to us. Though you may use the word a lot, it may be a problem for the rest of the site.

To see the number of views and visits a particular web page or document receives:

  • Log in to Siteimprove.
  • In the main navigation bar on the left, go to Analytics > Content > All pages.
    • If you don't see the menu, click the menu icon (looks like three stacked lines possibly with “Menu” or “Show Menu”).
    • If you don't see Analytics in the menu, click either Main Menu or the Dashboard button to get to the correct level to see it.
  • Use the search box on the right. (“Search in table by” if using a screen reader) to search using the URL or title of your content.

Tips:

Note: If you can't see your page(s) in analytics, contact us and we’ll help set them up.

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