Silktide

Western offers access to Silktide, a web improvement tool that helps content authors, web developers, and marketers build quality websites.

Silktide provides insight on content quality, accessibility, search engine optimization (SEO), and performance. Read on to learn how you can provide engaging web experiences that extend audience reach.

Silktide Setup

Web Communication Technologies (WebTech) can help you get ready to make website improvements.

Getting Access

To get access to the Silktide platform:

  1. Email Web Help to request access. WebTech will get you assigned with the proper permissions.
    • Note: You will need to let WebTech know which site or group of pages you would like to access to in the platform.
  2. Once you’re given the all-clear to login, you can log into Silktide with your university email.

What's Included

Silktide offers modules that help you track four key areas of web governance.

The institutional homepage measures well in content, accessibility, and marketing. User experience has room for growth.

Content

The Content module covers issues like spelling, grammar, broken links, readability, content accessibility, and content SEO.

 

Accessibility

The Accessibility module focuses on how well webpages conform to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 and 2.2. These checks go into details about issues that impact people with visual, auditory, cognitive, and motor disabilities.

Marketing

The Marketing module looks at keywords, ads, content optimization, amount of content, and technical optimization.

 

User Experience

The User Experience module highlights issues that occur with mobile devices, user flows, images, uptime, and functionality.

Silktide Checks

Silktide automatically scans your webpages and presents potential improvements as checks. When you first look it may feel a little overwhelming. Some content, such as a PDF document can generate 10 or more checks, most are easy to resolve with the click of a button. 

WebTech Managed Checks

Many of the checks are not something WebTech expects you to be able to fix as they are either something that needs server configuration or some part of the web platform such as Drupal or WordPress itself. Examples of these are:

  • Reduce Round Trip Times
  • Reduce JavaScript execution time
  • Review long main-thread tasks

 

Tips for Getting Started

Not sure where to start? No worries—use these tips to get more familiar with Silktide.

Keep in mind:

It is okay to ignore links that you are certain are not being reached due to restrictions like on campus or VPN only access.

Use the learn option when reviewing possible misspellings for branded words or technical terms specific to your website.

Explore Each Check

Silktide organizes the items it finds as checks. Some may seem irrelevant, but it is useful to review the pages found.

If you don't understand what the check does, at the top of each check's page, is text that explains what the purpose of the check is and often an explanatory video, an audio described version is available as well by following the link to view the video.

You may find content surfaced by these checks that you no longer need published. Feel free to unpublish pages that are no longer needed.

Silktide displays an automated check and related video about avoiding the same link text for different destinations.

Optimize Images

You most likely have an active check with the title, Consider Optimizing Images.

This check shows image files on your site that could benefit from improved compression making your site faster to load.

The best part, as you review the images, you can in the same screen, download the optimized version to replace the non-optimized one currently on the website.

Silktide's inspector offers the option to download an optimized image of 1.3 MB, compared to the original 2.4 MB.

Silktide Resources

If you aren't sure where to find more info on an issue or need help, there are tools and services ready for you.

Academy

The academy includes on-demand videos, full course paths, blog articles, and other resources to help you use Silktide to its fullest.

 A row of video thumbnails, with a search bar and a list of topics on the left. Videos include an intro to WCAG, a web accessibility overview, why it matters, and how it affects people.
An intro to accessibility course covers what accessibility is and the Silktide accessibility module

Help Center

Silktide's help center offers quick access to help articles and chat support for any questions you have.

A chat-like window on the screen pops up with a friendly greeting. The pop-up has features to ask questions and search for help articles

Other Silktide questions?

Please reach out by email to webhelp@wwu.edu about using Silktide for Western websites.