The Yolo County website is an incredibly valuable community resource. This is increasingly the primary place that the residents of Yolo County, and beyond, access information and the services they need to live, work, and visit our County. Over the course of the last year, a coordinated effort to improve our site has been underway. Despite a dedicated focus on training and collaboration among our 100+ content authors, a significant amount of work remains. Right now, our site contains hundreds of broken links, misspellings, lack of ADA accessibility, and suffers from inconsistent, and sometimes confusing, information. The reason is not a lack of staff skill or effort but that we do not have the necessary tools to proactively monitor these important elements of our site. A subscription from Siteimprove, Inc. for automated website content optimization and quality assurance monitoring will dramatically improve the quality and consistency of our public website information by offering our page authors the clear and current feedback to make corrections and improvements. This service is applicable to the www.yolocounty.org, www.yoloda.org, and www.yolocountysheriff.com websites.
Siteimprove, Inc. digitally scans all of our public webpages and returns information in the specific areas described below to a user dashboard. We are able to setup an unlimited number of users and filter their experience so they only see the feedback for the pages they manage. The easy to navigate dashboard shows the flagged item and the exact location within the page. Scans are done at regular weekly intervals and can be initiated as needed, on demand. The primary administrator (the Webmaster) can monitor the progress of all author updates as well as institute policy on things such as formatting and content. Further, our current internet provider, Vision, is actively working on a content management system (CMS) add-in that places the Siteimprove tools directly in the CMS. Once implemented, improving the Yolo County website is easily quantified in tracking baseline reports on necessary improvements compared to those same reports after the corrections have been made. The Analytics component will offer detailed data over time on visitor behavior and interaction, which will allow for individual page/program evaluation by Department Subject Matter Experts (SMEs). The CMS user group will be invited to collaboratively agree on different measures to track; however the following items will be automatically tracked:
- # and % decrease of broken links
- # and % decrease of misspelling
- # and % increase of ADA accessibility and progress toward 100% WCAG 2.0 accessibility standards
The County currently has over 3,000 active pages on our website. Once implemented, using the Siteimprove service will allow each Department and its assigned page content authors to manage the necessary improvements and in the end, save time and resources while providing a more effective resource for Yolo County. Siteimprove demonstrations were facilitated for the CMS user group in June of 2017. Shortly after, all users were invited to join an online demonstration. Users were asked to consider the service and provide feedback. While some Departments did not respond, only positive feedback has been received.
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