ActiveStandards™

Large, multi-national enterprises rarely have a single website. Most have dozens, or even hundreds, serving different markets, regions or audiences.

That means dozens (or hundreds) of local web editors and content contributors – most of whom are not full-time web professionals or brand experts.

Now comes the hard part: getting all of these local editors to produce a standard of quality and consistency that best represents your brand.

For an increasing number of world-leading companies, Website Quality Monitoring provides a powerful environment for measuring and managing website quality.

Monitoring supports all of your quality management efforts, integrating them into a complete quality management system:

Brand and web guidelines

Your published documents that tell people how to treat the brand (logos, colours, etc.) and how to approach web issues (images, tags, fonts, sizes, charts, SEO and accessibility compliance etc.).

These are hugely important, but, unfortunately, not widely consulted.

A Content Management System

A CMS makes it easy for people to publish content and can include standard templates which help editors use common style sheets.

An essential tool but cannot be used to prevent all policy breaches – any CMS that tried to do so would be restrictive to the point of being unusable. And many standards are outside the remit of a CMS

Web editor training

A program of training sessions (live and web-based) that show editors how to use the CMS and how to follow the published guidelines.

Again, vital but never enough to ensure consistent quality. There are simply too many editors and they change too often.

A helpdesk

Making sure there's always someone available to answer questions from web editors and content contributors.

Good to have – as long as people use it.

These four quality management practices are all ways to promote compliance and best practice among web editors. But they don't help you ensure it.

Website Quality Monitoring: the essential piece

Without actively monitoring the performance of your web editors and the quality of the pages they publish, there's simply no way to ensure that your policies are being followed or understood.

Until recently, the only way to do this was to conduct manual audits: looking over a sample of pages and reporting back on the breaches you've found. For web estates extending to hundreds of thousands of pages, this is hugely time-consuming, expensive and nowhere near thorough enough.

ActiveStandards™: website monitoring simplified

ActiveStandards™ is the leading automated website quality monitoring service.

It automatically monitors every page on every website you manage, reporting all policy breaches to local web editors and the central communications team.

The benefits:

• Raise all websites to the highest level of quality, usability, accessibility & consistency.
• Help local editors get it right, painlessly.
• Give the central management team insight into the state of all websites.
• Provide essential feedback loops so you can improve your policies, templates, training and helpdesk support.
• Manage your progress towards world-class website quality across every page of every site that carries your brand.

If you're not monitoring quality, you're not managing quality.