The Siteimprove Content Management dashboard guides us through the various items we need to monitor to ensure the website remains high quality and accessible to everyone, from anywhere, on any device.
Siteimprove focusses on three main elements - quality, accessibily and SEO.
Accessibilty is the most important aspect for the RMH. We have set a target for a minimum of 95% average compliance across Level A, AA and AAA and WAI-ARIA authoring practices.
We want to provide information about the RMH for everyone, regardless of a person's ability or device. Find out more our commitment to accessibility.
Access the Content Management dashboard
Breakdown
See breakdown of all quality issues.
Focus on fixing
Pages that are difficult to read is impossible to totally fix. Medical terms bring this score down, and we've already done what we can to avoid using the terms or by explaining them and/or adding hover text (glossary). You could pick away at the worst pages over time if you like, as I suspect that some service pages could be improved. Maybe even use the new Bing GPT chat to rewrite it for you!
Pages with long sentences are mainly caused by Services, News and Research pages. This is a hard one, because our content is complex, so things are sometimes written in longer sentences to get the point across simply. Do what you can to keep sentences short.
Old documents continue to cause an issue. Talk to Manager Communications about either removing old corporate documents or putting all corporate documents in Prompt, then adding links.
Documents in formats other than PDF or XML will improve if you can get all referral documents into Prompt. Pages with documents in formats other than PDF or XML is the same issue - its just telling you where the pages are.
Monitor
Monitor broken links, broken links in PDFs, misspellings, words to review and policies on a daily basis.
Over time, all CMS authors should fix their own quality issues.
Potential issues = you have to 'teach' Siteimprove by going through a review process. Once you have reviewed all occurrences of an issue on one or two pages, on the next crawl, that issue should go away. Sometimes it doesn't go away because there are more issues flushed out.
Check annotations, as some issues are not resolvable (or have deliberately been ignored) and have been noted as such.
Breakdown
See the breakdown.
Focus on fixing
Colour contrast does not meet enhanced requirement is a new standard. Andrew has addressed the major contrast issues, but there is no point fixing these smaller elements until Laura finishes the brand work and we (hopefully) have an accessible colour palette to work with. This is why the website is so blue now - aside from black or dark grey, the three blues are the only accessible colour which can be used for text/links.
Monitor
Colour contrast does not meet minimum requirement can be painful. The video keeps coming up as not having sufficient contrast, even though we have taught Siteimprove all the colours near the text.
Most of what is reported is very difficult to change on a hospital website. Our content is complex, so we have long URLs, long page titles, long descriptions.
Breakdown
See the breakdown.
Focus on fixing
Redirect chains - hopefully will be fixed if Jess W can update the offending PDFs.
Duplicate meta descriptions - you should fix these, but I doubt you'll be able to fix the two listed. They are for events, which are essentially the same event, just on different dates, so you will want the meta description to be the same. Ignore those two, but if other pages crop up, fix them by rewriting the intro text. Worst case, you can also add an SEO description, but take care using this field because most people don't know its there, and you can cause 'title version control' issues if you don't update the content.
Difficult-to-read pages (Flesch-Kincaid Reading Ease). We're currently sitting at mostly Grade 8-9 reading level (plain English). If you want to improve the score, look at picking off some highly used pages, and having a go at simplifying them to see if we can get the score up to 71-80.
301 redirects - as discussed previously, be careful with these. In a few months, review the 302 to see if you can remove some/all of them. Only setup 301s where you must. Use URL shortening services or QR codes if people want to print links to our site in brochures.
Ignore
Images with empty alt attributes - two pages using the PayPal log, which doesn't have an alt attribute and we can't add one.
URLs are too long - there's not much we can do about this. We have a deep IA, and we have complex content, so to provide meaningful URLs, some are very long. If you wanted to try to fix some of them, you could, but take care in case the URLs are printed somewhere or already have a redirect on them.
Meta descriptions are too long/short is not worth the effort. Very pedantic standard and not worth many points (ie very little SEO improvement).
Sentences are too long. I think this one is overly difficult to achieve and not worth the effort. Like difficult-to-read pages, you could look at specific highly used pages to make sure they are as easily readable as possible.
Low content word count. This one is tricky. Our content is what it is. We have tried to simplify content, which means less words, but it seems this has conversely caused low word count. I think we have to largely ignore this.
Missing structured data markup. Andrew advised we should ignore this. Structured markup is for structured content such as flights, where search engines are grabbing the same fields and populating with content (ie flight times, costs, dates etc).
Desktop speed. This is with Andrew. The mobile and desktop speeds are still fluid as he and Fergus continue tweaking and optimising the server.
We have created a variety of policies to flush out common issues that are not detected via Quality, Accessibility or SEO.
You should monitor policies regularly and fix detected issues.
View all policies.