Keeping it clean
I know you’ve been there. At some point, you’ve landed on a web page that had a misspelling or broken link.
Remember the frustration you felt and how it made you feel about the owner of the page? If you’re anything like me, you probably lost some trust in the site and didn’t stick around long.
Everyone wants an error-free web experience. Luckily, broken links and misspelled words are two of the easiest errors to fix.
Easy, that is, if you can find them.
Liberty is on a mission to help you track down these simple mistakes so you can fix them. Using a tool called SiteImprove, we’re able to scan the website and flag broken links and potential misspellings. In fact, you may have received an email telling you to check a report for your department’s web page errors and let us know when you’ve fixed them. If you haven’t gotten one of these emails, congratulations! If you have, thank you for checking out the report and following up with us.
We are still refining the reporting process – brand names and personal names often get flagged as potential misspellings, when they are actually correct – but we are excited about the potential improvements to our website users’ experience.
What you can do
To find and fix errors before SiteImprove finds them, you need to be diligent about reviewing your department webpages. Check your links manually by clicking through them periodically to make sure they still work. If a URL has changed, you will want to update your links accordingly. To find and fix spelling errors, we recommend a tool like Grammarly, which has free browser extensions for Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Edge.
In fact, it’s a good idea to set up a regular maintenance plan for your web pages, where you schedule a time to manually review all your web content to make sure it’s useful and error-free.
Check out these articles to learn more about instituting your own quality control plan, and feel free to contact any of us on the Web Content team with questions.
Thanks for doing your part to keep Liberty’s website clean and error free.
Meet the Author:
Diane Austin
dyaustin@liberty.edu
SEO Specialist – LU Web Content Team
