Nevada County, CA Uses CivicPlus Web Governance Tools to Enforce Best Practice Policies

The County of Nevada maintains a government website that includes more than 50 different business lines. With so many different entities and content creators working under one branded website, managing website quality was a challenge, and best practices started eroding. The result was thousands of broken links, misspellings, and other quality assurance issues.

The County partnered with the CivicPlus® Web Accessibility solution team to implement Monsido (now named Acquia Optimize), one of our accessibility solution partners, to support its compliance improvements.

Using CivicPlus’ accessibility software saves the County hundreds of hours by providing a way to find and fix errors quickly. It also serves as a springboard to re-engage content creators and enforce best practice policies. What follows is a question-and-answer discussion with a member of the Nevada County government regarding their experiences with CivicPlus and Acquia Optimize.

Read Our Interview with Nevada County Below

Would you recommend [Acquia Optimize] to other websites in your industry?

Yes. It has been a great tool—a great value for sure. We’ve just started a complete website redesign project. We will be relaunching our website, so I’m sure we will be scanning our new website before making it live.

What brought you to [Acquia Optimize]?

We redesigned and launched our new website about four years ago… The only way we could move forward was to change our operation internally. We trained content creators in each business line as best as possible. However, over time, process procedures and best practices started to erode. We ended up with lots of dead, wrong, and bad content. We needed a way to crawl the database to find and fix errors efficiently.

How did you find errors before [Acquia Optimize]?

Before [Acquia Optimize], we found errors manually or did not even pay attention to them. We are essentially made up of 50 different companies. So, as you can imagine, it was feasibly impossible to continue physically searching for errors ourselves. We needed a tool to help us bring those errors and issues to the top.

How was it getting started with [Acquia Optimize]?

We worked with Jacob very closely. It was painless to get started, and he tweaked the tool so it ran efficiently for us. Also, I think it should be said that we have a full test instance of our website, so we could use [Acquia Optimize] there before moving it into our environment.

How does [Acquia Optimize] fit into your workflow?

Our part-time employee uses [Acquia Optimize] no fewer than two or three times a week. We have 50 to 80 content creators creating new pages and content daily. [Acquia Optimize] has been a great management and governance tool because it allows us to get back to those content creators so they can correct misspellings, or we can do it for them quickly.

What did your first scan show you?

We knew it would be a disaster. I think we had 1,800 or 1,900 misspellings! We had at least that many broken links.

How long did it take you to see results?

The results were immediate. We made huge changes right off the bat. We had a couple of really nasty broken links that we didn’t realize were there, and we were able to find them and get them corrected quickly. The benefit was huge right off the bat.

How much time would you say [Acquia Optimize] saves you?

In the hundreds of hours.

What is your favorite feature of [Acquia Optimize]?

Broken links are our favorite feature. We obviously link to external content within other government entities, and those websites also change constantly. That is probably the feature we use the most and get the most value out of, so we can ensure all those links work.

The other great feature is having the error in the list, clicking on it, going right to the page, and having it highlight where the issues are. It makes correcting errors very fast.