ActiveStandards™

ActiveStandards™ regularly scans your entire web presence; runs an extensive set of checkpoints (custom and best practice) against every single page; and reports back to your editors and central managers with clear, actionable information.

The policy

It starts with your policy: a set of guidelines that captures your own brand and corporate standards as well as industry best practice standards for usability, accessibility and searchability (search engine optimisation).

Magus consulting can help you create an effective policy that incorporates industry best practice and reflects your brand guidelines.

Your checkpoints

We turn each policy guideline into a checkpoint – a logical rule that the ActiveStandards engine can interpret. There are two kinds:

• Custom checkpoints: your fonts, colors, style guidelines, legal disclaimers and preferences.
• Best practice checkpoints: usability, accessibility and searchability rules based on widely accepted industry standards, W3C guidelines (and years of experience).

The creation of your complete set of checkpoints is included in the ActiveStandards set-up process. And adding more is easy.

The scan

The ActiveStandards spider crawls over every page of your web estate, comparing its code, content and presentation against the checkpoints you've established. It performs diagnostics at a volume and level of accuracy impossible to achieve manually.

The dashboards

Scan results are presented in a set of intuitive dashboards that provide clear, actionable results, free of confusing jargon, to help editors resolve errors quickly.

There are two main dashboard views

Management dashboard:

This gives the central communications team a crystal clear picture of the quality status of the entire global web estate. Graphical trend analysis exposes problem areas at-a-glance, and provides the hard facts that managers need to optimise their operations.

Website dashboard:

This shows editors exactly where they've strayed, why it matters and what they need to do about it. Including every instance where any checkpoint has been breached, with views by website, by page, by checkpoint type and by the priority in which they should be addressed.

See the dashboards >

Asset reports and performance metrics

ActiveStandards lets you generate powerful asset reports showing all your images, PDFs, links and email addresses to make sure everything is perfectly up-to-date.

Added performance metrics give you a sortable list of all monitored websites; their quality levels; the least and most-abused checkpoints; and other key metrics, all as a snapshot and over time.

The workflow

 

Editors:

ActiveStandards supports editor workflow by automatically prioritising errors, and asking editors to fix the most urgent issues first. Issue prioritisation is a powerful feature for busy editors and gives you peace of mind by ensuring that the most serious errors are spotted and acted on fast.

Managers:

ActiveStandards is an enabling tool not a straitjacket. Custom rules can be set for local websites, allowing you to manage local as well as central policy.

In addition, if local editors have a good reason for breaking an existing rule, the built-in appeals process helps resolve the issue quickly. The local editor simply raises an appeal and it's flagged in the Management Dashboard. Once approved, the issue won't be presented again.

Integrating with your CMS

ActiveStandards integrates directly and simply with all the major CMS platforms.