DubBot automatically checks for website accessibility, SEO, and generally accepted website best practices. Although these checks are all beneficial as out-of-the-box functionality, one of the more powerful and flexible features in DubBot is the Custom Checks that our users can build.
Custom Checks are useful in many ways for website managers to extend their reach and abilities to oversee content being developed by other individuals and quickly know where changes may need to occur.
The main uses with Custom Checks have been the following:
- Extend accessibility checks to guide additional website accessibility recommendations.
- Flag and fix known issues that are introduced into website content.
- Flag and update website content that has changed. Think employment rate of graduates or a Department name change.
- Enforce style guidelines and provide a layer of suggestions to content contributors.
In this blog, I'd like to highlight Custom Checks that other DubBot users have used to enforce content standards. One of my part-time hobbies is reading through style guides of different organizations to get these checks documented and built.
The following are common Custom Checks that we have rolled out to our users based on their Style Guides:
- Flag the use of advisor. Adviser should be used.
- Capitalize Campus when it is prefaced by the proper name of a campus location
- Only use ACC/SEC acronym after Atlantic Coast Conference or Southeast Conference has been mentioned on the page first. This can, of course, be customized for any acronym.
- Any Linked Headings should have the Heading tag wrapping the link.
- Do not link heading content.
- Flag any images that are the only linked element.
- Flag multiple line breaks used in a row.
- Links to external domains should open in a new tab or have some code snippet that warns users that they are exiting the current website.
- Do not use Alum or Alumnae.
- Review the use of Associate's because Associate's degree should not be possessive.
- Capitalize Bachelor and Master when it is followed by "of."
- Flag for inappropriate use of punctuation with degrees.