Laserfiche WebLink
<br /> <br /> STAFF REPORT <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />TO: Mayor Keis and Members of City Council <br /> <br />FROM: Bryce Shearen, Parks & Recreation/Community Services Manager <br /> <br />DATE: February 12, 2020 <br /> RE: Website Improvement Proposal <br /> <br />ACTION REQUESTED <br />Motion to approve the service agreement and quote from Siteimprove for $4,500.00 for 1-year of <br />service. <br /> <br />BACKGROUND <br />Currently, the city website has over 1100 pages and over 400 PDF documents. The goal of the <br />website is to provide quality and accessible content for site visitors. To make sure that the <br />content is relevant and accessible, a great deal of staff time is needed to manually check each <br />page to make sure it is free of errors and adheres to accessibility best practices. Also, since the <br />content is continually being edited or added it is extremely time consuming and not an efficient <br />use of staff time. The Strategic Plan identified a goal of creating efficiencies and this is a service <br />as an additional tool to help us reach that goal. While the majority of the website management is <br />done by me, there are other staff authors and two separate pages for the Little Canada Fire <br />Department and Canadian Days. Even though they manage their pages, the city would still want <br />to make sure that the content follows the best practices guidelines. <br />Staff has been talking with a local company, Siteimprove, which provides a service/platform that <br />incorporates multiple website enhancement tools into one easy to use dashboard that also <br />provides weekly reports to staff. The reports will include misspellings, broken links, readability, <br />accessibility issues, and errors, missing alt text, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) checks, and <br />much more. The reports can be tailored to different departments, different levels of information <br />and different staff can receive different reports. A demo of the product was viewed by staff <br />which showed a sample of 500 pages on the current website that were scanned and the errors that <br />were found. A snapshot of the current website score can be seen in the attached document <br />(Content Performance Report). The website scores are compared to industry standards and other <br />cities and counties. <br />One area of importance is making sure that the city is following the federal guidelines for web <br />accessibility from the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). Siteimprove will not <br />only help identify and fix the issues, but they also partner with WCAG and will incorporate new <br />updates and changes into the platform before the official release to help ensure that the website is <br />within the guidelines before new updates are officially implemented. <br />Staff is not aware of another all-inclusive premium product that will provide all of the services. <br />There are products and tools that can supply these website improvements individually but often