Boise State University

The Client

Founded in 1932, Boise State University stands as a beacon of academic excellence, innovation, and community engagement in the heart of Idaho. With a commitment to student success, research, and public service, Boise State is a leader in providing world-class education in a vibrant and dynamic learning environment.

The Situation

Boise State has a relatively large website, totaling around 650 websites, over 230,000 pages, and 8,000 documents. Exercising governance for such a robust website and ensuring content meets ADA compliance was simply too much for an executive director, one full-time web accessibility employee, one CMS manager, and three part-time student workers.

The university prides itself on being research-driven, inclusive, and accessible. Not being able to fix broken links or identify potential ADA liability issues left the school paying for a defunct web management tool and open to possible legal headaches. 

“Our previous website management software became unusable,” said Shad Jessen, executive director of support, engagement, and university web strategy in Boise State’s Office of Information Technology. “Months would go by where the system could not diagnose problems. The inability to access data became a huge obstacle.”

Ultimately, the previous vendor needed to be replaced due to a medley of problems that were severe enough to render the system unnavigable.

The Challenge

Boise State needed a solution that would help them identify which documents were unreachable, provide an inventory of all content, and report on broken links and misspellings. The critical challenges the university was looking to solve were:

• Fully cataloging the robust website content
• Diligently scanning all web accessibility and web governance checks
• Reporting on broken links and misspellings for manual correction
• Compliance with WCAG standards through monitoring new content
• Quickly identifying and replacing outdated content 
• Finding specific data, including web content with no engagement
• Enabling relevant page consolidation
• Broadly identifying internal and external PDFs on the website

Asset reference

The Solution

After much research, the university implemented Acquia Optimize to help its editors maintain consistency, accuracy, and accessibility across its expansive content. The Acquia Optimize features and add-on tools that were leveraged to address Boise State’s challenges included: 

• Quality Assurance module
• Accessibility module
• Color Contrast Checker
• Content Policies module
• Statistics module
• Performance module
• SEO module
• Inventory tools

The Results

Acquia Optimize empowers Boise State by providing tools to detect broken links, correct misspellings, and update stale content. It assists in ensuring accessibility compliance, offers a detailed inventory of the site, enhances search engine optimization (SEO) practices, and provides quick filtering criteria to identify specific content or code. Additionally, Acquia Optimize offers essential analytics, enabling quick assessment of content engagement. This suite of features helps the university’s web strategy team ensure web content is reliable and accurate, effectively serving the needs of students, faculty, staff, and the wider community.

Boise State can now quickly and efficiently create and run policies. “The policies are simple to create and make my workdays much more productive because of the sheer speed at which Acquia Optimize allows us to filter our content searches,” Jessen shared.

Overall, the university’s website has significantly improved since implementing Acquia Optimize:

• Accessibility score soared from 75.38% to 97.34%
• Quality assurance score increased from 75.67% to 99.11%
• SEO score jumped from 82.32% to 91.43%