Quality assurance is the process of checking that your web content is functioning correctly and addressing any errors before they are found by the public.
Siteimprove is tool used by the City to maintain quality assurance. The tool crawls the site and checks for broken links and misspellings. Each department’s content manager will be provided an account and is responsible for using this tool to locate and address any issues on their site.
Make sure every statement is correct and up to date. Ask yourself, is anything written in a date-specific way that would be outdated soon? If it makes sense for the topic, edit it to be always relevant.
Firefox is the recommended browser for editing in Drupal. However, users may be using different browsers. View your content in other browsers (Chrome, Internet Explorer 11, Safari) to ensure that there are no issues particular to that browser.
Use resource accounts for email addresses and key contacts when possible. If a specific staff person must be listed, make record of this, in case this staff person leaves the position or City and this content needs to be updated.
When copying and pasting content from other software, like Microsoft Word, you must remove any formatting from that program, as it can transfer unwanted code into your content in Drupal and break the formatting.
- Highlight all content and use the “Paste as Plain Text” button in the body editor to clean up your content.
- Do not use bullets and numbers directly from Word. Use the bullets and numbered list buttons in Drupal.
It’s best to link to City of Austin-owned websites. If you must link to an outside site, it should be:
- A state, a federal or local government site,
- An educational Web site (.edu),
- Or an organization with an official partnership with a City department or program.
Do not link to any other outside site as risks include:
- Appearing as if the City is showing favoritism,
- Security concerns as external sites are not governed by the City,
- And inappropriate, lewd content concerns as external sites are not governed by the City.
View any images, videos, documents or application embeds to make sure they are appearing as the correct size, spacing, placement, formatting and functioning. Take advantage of the preview function in your content management system.
After publishing content, click on all hyperlinks to ensure that they work correctly. Broken links frustrate users and make your content coach sad. Make sure they link to reliable sources, too.
Many users may access your content on a mobile device. View your content on a tablet and/or smartphone to ensure there are no issues with the mobile view. If you don’t have a device available, shrink the size of your web browser from right to left to see the mobile view.
Always spell check content to maintain professionalism and credibility. Review any misspelled words that are underlined red while editing and determine if they need correction.