Quality Monitoring Tool for optimised SEO and standards compliance 

Maidenhead, UK, 3rd September 2009 – SDL Tridion, leader in Web Content Management (WCM) and part of SDL, leader in Global Information Management (GIM), today announces the launch of Safeguard, a quality and compliance monitoring tool to help brand managers and content editors achieve a high quality web presence. Safeguard automatically scans companies’ websites to expose any issues with search engine optimisation, usability, accessibility, legal and brand standards.

Safeguard is a website quality and compliance-monitoring tool powered by Magus ActiveStandards and is integrated with SDL Tridion’s Web Content Management System. By complying with a wide variety of guidelines and rules that communication specialists have created, the tool significantly contributes to improved SEO, visitor experience, usability and brand value.

Unilever – a long time customer of SDL Tridion – is one of the first users of Safeguard. “Integrating the SDL Tridion Safeguard website quality and compliance service into the SDL Tridion CMS platform has brought real gains in operational efficiency and quality control to our production processes,” said Duncan Haughey, IT Project Manager, Global Communication Solutions of Unilever. “The Safeguard service provides ongoing management information on the compliance status of the published live web presence.  This means we can focus our resources where they are most needed, assisting our editors to ensure our global web presence is standards compliant and efficiently governed. It’s a complete solution for pre- and post-publication website quality control.”

The tool allows editors to pro-actively validate a page in real-time in the pre-publication staging environment. Safeguard uses a best practice library of built-in checkpoints and each one flags up the issues it specifically looks for – usability, accessibility or SEO – enabling editors to prioritise which errors to correct first.

Haughey continues, “When our editors are producing new content within the CMS they receive direct feedback on the compliance status of their web content. This feedback is available at the click of a button and helps prevent the introduction of errors to our live website, which maintains the quality of the Unilever web presence, enhances the user experience, and improves the effectiveness of our web presence.” 

“Retaining control of how the brand is communicated online is core to any digital marketing strategy but presents a significant challenge,” said Jan Jaap Kolleman, CEO of SDL Tridion. “Safeguard uses checkpoints based on the company’s own proprietary online brand standards on a wide variety of content presentation guidelines. We welcome this new partnership with Magus.”

“Web editors who are, in the main, not technically trained needed a tool that is easy to use and which immediately highlights where any errors on a site reside,” says Simon Lande, CEO of Magus. “The management team needs to know how a site performs over time with regard to compliance with best practice and company standards. It’s all about providing visibility and objective metrics to help achieve the websites’ business goals. SDL Tridion and Magus are a natural fit for multi-site, multi-editor web estates.”

More information and a real-time demo of Safeguard will be presented during our webinar “Delivering brand consistency online” on 9th September. Register here.