We have created a special tool that will help website managers to get a handle on the scope of their site. This tool is called the surveyor. Sites with many contributors can be come large and sprawling, with this tool you will be able to regain control and understand the scope of your site.
Index Site
Before we start analyzing your site, we have to find as many pages as possible by generating an index of pages. During this process, our crawler will start by going to your home page and gathering as links as possible and adding them to the index. From there it will continue to crawl your site until no more unique pages can be found.
Some pages may not be crawled during the indexing of your site. These pages are typically isolated pages that aren’t referenced anywhere else on your site. An example would be a campaign page that is only referenced in an email or ad. Moreover, any pages that are self-referencing or recursive will not be indexed. An example would be event pages that contain a calendar, pages like these would cause the index to continue indefinitely.
Extract Content
While your site is being indexed, all content on your site will be extracted and archived for further analysis. The content includes any text information about your site as well as associated meta (authors, publishing dates, links, and more).
Broken Links
The web and your site are continually changing and moving so the Surveyor will keep watch and notify you when that happens. Each indexed page on your site will have all links checked to make sure they are still accessible.
Accessibility
The primary job of your site is deliver your content the largest possible audience. We will make sure all your pages are accessible to users of all capabilities by analyzing each page with tools that check for issues against Section 508 compliance and WCAG2(AAA) standards.
Performance
Having your site responsive and available is important to keeps visitors to your site engaged. We scan each page and provide you with the information you need to improve load time, readability on all devices, identify heavy assets, and much more.
Reports
All of these scans create a lot of actionable information about your site. To help you and our team work through these issues we created reports to assist in making your site better.
Tooling
The Surveyor currently uses technologies from Google (lighthouse) for performance and best practices checking, pa11y for advanced accessibility checking which follows the a11y project, and some other in-house tools written by our very talented team of developers. The entire interface is was created for Ellucian technology management customers and is hosted by Amazon Web Services.
If you are an existing customer and are interested in using this service at your institution, please contact your Service Delivery Manager or the Ellucian Web Services team to start surveying your sites.