JCU Web Team Awarded Siteimprove 2019 Certificate for Web Excellence
JCU Web Team (left to right: Berenice Cocciolillo, Riccardo Pugliese and Elisa Aceri)
The John Cabot University Web Communications team (Director of Web Communications Berenice Cocciolillo, Webmaster Riccardo Pugliese and Web Communications Assistant Elisa Aceri) has been awarded the Siteimprove Certificate for Web Excellence 2019. Siteimprove is a website-optimizing software designed to help users perfect their digital presence. The platform assigns a score for the website’s performance in each of the following areas: accessibility, quality assurance, search engine optimization (SEO), and security issues.
This is the first edition of the competition, which saw the participation of about 100 candidates in Italy from different sectors (education, transportation, administrative, financial, etc.) The award is given to those who have secured a score of at least 85% in their DCI (digital certainty index), which is calculated as an average of quality assurance, accessibility, and SEO.
This certificate is the result of over two years of work. What initiatives have been undertaken during this time?
Berenice: We implemented Siteimprove in 2017. This is the first time our website (www.johncabot.edu) has taken full advantage of a web-optimizing software. The website has over 700 pages to monitor and quality check. Having a platform that allows us to monitor all pages at once has been instrumental in helping us to ensure brand consistency and uniformity for JCU’s online presence as well as to make our workflow smoother and more efficient. We would like to thank Roberta Cammarata at Siteimprove who has guided and assisted us throughout the process, as well as our former colleague Axel Keicher whose contribution in the early stages remains invaluable.
Riccardo: As far as quality assurance is concerned, Siteimprove allows us to process all broken links/images in a single batch, which saves time. All “issues” are divided by category and organized by level of severity (from errors to warnings, to reviews, all classified from A to AAA.) This helps us to keep issues organized and set priorities. You can also list issues by page or individually to verify if a problem is present in multiple locations.
Elisa: Recently we have been focusing on accessibility, making sure that the website is fully accessible to people with disabilities. This entails for example providing alternative text to elements on image maps, adding titles to iFrames, making sure that each id element is unique, and increasing the visibility of links. This is an ongoing project and much remains to be done, but we are definitely on the right track.
What are your future projects?
Berenice: We are currently working on revamping our homepage to make it more mobile-friendly and dynamic. The new page will load faster, it will be more interactive and we hope that it will provide a better experience for the user.
