The Mile High City soars to new heights

The problem

For years, the City and County of Denver’s two web administrators struggled to maintain 6,000 pages across multiple sites. While they supported 140 content authors in the organization who had access to the CMS, making sure that every detail and error was attended to was untenable, particularly given that there was no audit tool, much less one that could crawl through 12,000 PDFs.

Quality assurance wasn’t the only problem. Traffic and engagement reporting across the organization was antiquated, with staff members requesting analytics reports that the web masters had to manually generate and share via spreadsheets. For the two-person web team, widespread inefficiencies added to the frustration over lack of robust, reliable quality assurance.

The solution

Once Siteimprove’s Accessibility tools were unleashed, content publishers within each department and agency automatically received regular reports from their dashboards that showed where errors like broken links (even in PDFs) or inadequate alt tags lurked; with minimal training, they could make the fixes themselves. This dramatic shift gave the content publishers a sense of empowerment, and everyone involved found it gratifying to see Quality Assurance scores rise dramatically across the organization’s multiple sites.

Now, automatic monthly updates keep content publishers motivated. "People really like it that DCI score became a goal for teams in departments," says Sarah Stanek, web administrator. And thanks to Siteimprove, it’s much easier to prioritize pages that need attention most, while the Policies feature makes updating fragments of content a snap — a major benefit when a new mayor takes office or when jargon or acronyms the public doesn’t know has crept into content.

Getting a hold on accessibility issues was just the beginning. Once content publishers were trained on the basics of Siteimprove analytics tools, dependence on the web team for reports diminished: The tools were intuitive, so those who needed reports could "self-serve" in just a few key strokes.

"I used to have to pull analytics for everybody," says Chad Menard, senior web administrator. "It felt like the publishers weren’t interested in how to do it, or we couldn’t get them access to something like Google Analytics." Siteimprove completely changed the dynamic. "Now, a lot of agencies are tracking their own campaigns. They’re not calling us and saying, 'I don’t understand it,'" he says. That shift alone saves the web team about eight hours — an entire day — every month. Moreover, features like Core Wins, which spotlights vital tasks that need to be completed, go directly to stakeholders in departments — an additional massive gain in terms transparency and efficiency.

The wins from using Siteimprove have been so dramatic that the City and County of Denver is looking into adding a module to take advantage of AI Generate. With that functionality added to their suite of tools, they’ll leverage large language model technology to create a consistent voice across all their sites.

The results:

• 25% increase in DCI score
• 32% increase in Accessibility score
• 94 QA score