Frequently Asked Questions

You can learn how to become fully-trained within WordPress in order to edit and update content on your department’s website by following the instructions on our training page.

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), the international standards for Accessibility, 2.0 AA is the minimum standard for the site, and the university strives for WCAG 2.0 AAA compliance when reasonably feasible. Siteimprove and NAU accessibility analyst, Sean Kugler, will help with compliance.

Site Stewards and student workers are required to complete the training to become a WordPress user, which is the base level of training that every other WordPress user undergoes. Training is essential to Site Stewards so they are knowledgeable about web operations and can establish consistency in their site. View more information about Site Stewards.

Yes, everyone who desires to obtain access to edit and update content on their department’s website is required to take the training to become a WordPress user. Since the WordPress theme that NAU uses was developed in-house, many features are different than the standard WordPress instance and we want to ensure that users know how to navigate its interface optimally.

View more information about Unit Web Coordinators, including a complete list of UWCs for each unit.

Our public-facing website project (www.nau.edu) is focused on a OneNAU growth strategy, which includes continued work on prospective student pathways for recruitment, college- and program-specific content, through leadership presence, public-facing news, and other marketing initiatives to serve all our audiences and University initiatives. We also recognize the need to serve internal audience-oriented web content for current faculty, staff, and students. Sometimes referred to as an “intranet”, the internal-facing website of in.nau.edu will provide information in support of the current NAU community audiences and improve access to functional aspects while keeping our external WWW messaging succinct and clear.

No, in order to promote transparency all sites on in.nau.edu will be publicly accessible, this means that anyone can get to them and access the content without requiring an NAU account.

The in.nau.edu platform has the ability to require a CAS login for certain sites or pages that might need to be secured. However, there are a variety of options that can be used to provide secure content on the web based on the data classification. Please contact the WCM Support Team to review and discuss options.

ITS is supporting this change in domain name through the use of global find and replace tools to update links and menus as part of site launches into the in.nau.edu environment. We also create rules to capture and redirect traffic from the existing WWW site to the new location on IN. Because of that, initial issues were minimal, and over time as content is updated and search engines reindex, the site errors will become less prevalent.

There are some sites that have already gone live that will need to be moved over to the in.nau.edu environment or vice versa. Unit Web Coordinators and Site Stewards will be notified of these moves beforehand and will inform other WordPress users in their departments.

At this stage we are dealing with broad strokes at the site level, but know that we do need to get more granular and do so with an understanding as to what the ramifications are for customer and content editor experience. Defining that is part of discussions with ITS, University Marketing, and business stakeholders that are ongoing.

There are three primary sources for documentation and resources for Siteimprove:

1. The training page will provide you with a brief overview of the functionality of Siteimprove.
2. The Help Center and Academy provides in-depth explanations and detailed answers. This link can also be found in the upper, right corner after logging into Siteimprove itself.
3. If you would prefer in-person assistance, feel free to drop-in to one of our weekly open labs.

Yes, the “Recheck this page” button scans the live page and then reports its findings in the page report. The recheck button is described in further detail in the interactive Quality Assurance page report tutorial. Ensure that you are logged into Siteimprove before attempting to go through the tutorial.

No, Siteimprove only scans and reports on published, live pages.

The Accessibility and SEO errors that are not able to be fixed by the standard editor can be addressed by the Development team. There is no timeline for when the issues will be fixed, but the most serious ones will be prioritized first.

If a word or acronym that is spelled correctly is flagged as a misspelling on Siteimprove (ex: MyNAU), then you can submit a support form to request that it be added to the list of accepted words so that it doesn’t appear as a false positive result. Please note that misspellings are case-sensitive.

You can go to the page report by clicking on any of the links within the “Fix These Issues to Improve Your Score” and “Fixed Issues” modules from the page inspector.

NAU sites that change their URL will ideally have all of their links redirected so that nothing is broken as a result. However, since there is always a slight possibility of errors in this process, it is always best practice to fix the broken links on your site yourself instead of depending on this process.

The Digital Certainty Index™ (DCI™) is a measure of the quality and potential impact of a site’s digital presence, including:

• A website’s accessibility and usability
• A website’s credibility and trustworthiness
• How well-poised a website is to respond to SEO challenges

Read more on Siteimprove’s site.

If your site goes down while Siteimprove is scanning it, then any of the charts you look at will show as a drop to zero. We do not anticipate this to be an issue, but occasionally errors occur and the site will go down for a slight period of time as a result.

Rechecking a single page takes one to a few minutes. Please note that this time may vary if Siteimprove is currently crawling your site.

Since broken links and misspellings are some of the most common issues on the NAU site and some of the most frustrating things for users to experience, we recommend prioritizing these issues within the Quality Assurance module.

Siteimprove is the tool used to discover and present issues to you that it finds on your site. In order to actually fix the issues, you will need to login to WordPress, edit the page, correct the issues, and then publish the page.

The WCM Support Team will configure the proper settings within Siteimprove so that you automatically receive reports weekly for the site(s) you manage after you attend the Siteimprove training, you do not need to sign up anywhere.