WARWICK, R.I. – It’s been a busy year for CCRI Web Manager Dan Baker.

Two challenges are always top of mind these days: bringing the site up to WCAG 2.1 AA standards ahead of the 2027 ADA compliance, and consisently refining the college's website to keep it curren with with the ever-changing SEO landscape.

In this edition of Thinkers, Doers and Achievers, Knight Knowledge spoke with Baker to learn more about redesigning the website, meeting accessibility guidelines, and leveraging AI for web development.

Knight Knowledge: First, can you tell us a bit about your background and your role at CCRI?

Subject: I've been with the college for 11 years now. I actually started here as a part-time employee, moved into a full-time web developer role, and eventually worked my way up to web manager. These days, my job is really about making sure the website performs well for everyone who relies on it. I train and support content editors across the college so they can manage their own pages confidently, and I make sure everything we publish meets both our brand standards and our accessibility standards.

Knight Knowledge: You’ve done a lot of work making the website accessible to meet ADA guidelines. Can you walk us through some of these changes?

Subject: Accessibility has become a big part of what I do here. I'm part of CCRI's Accessibility Committee, and it's been great being part of the work the whole college is doing to meet the WCAG 2.1 AA standard ahead of the ADA compliance deadline in 2027. The website is really just one piece of it. For me, that's meant things like fixing color contrast, making sure everything works for people navigating by keyboard instead of a mouse, adding support for visitors sensitive to motion or animation, making sure link text is descriptive so someone using a screen reader knows where it actually goes, and making sure components like accordions and cards meet accessibility standards. Most of it is work people will never notice, but it makes a real difference for the people who need it.

Knight Knowledge: How has SEO changed, especially as Google's algorithms have changed, and what steps have you taken to ensure CCRI's website SEO keeps up?

Subject: SEO has changed a lot over the years. It used to be mostly keywords and meta tags, but Google's gotten a lot better at judging real user experience, page speed, and, lately, how well a site can even be understood by AI tools and search assistants. That last part is fairly new. So, there's just more to pay attention to now than there used to be.

I did a full technical SEO audit of the CCRI site and worked through many issues -- page speed, structured data, and content -- that weren't pulling their weight. I also added something called an llms.txt file, which is a newer standard -- basically a way of helping AI tools understand what CCRI actually offers before they answer someone's question about us. More people are searching that way now instead of typing straight into Google, so it felt worth doing. I've also kept our Google Business Profiles updated across all our campuses and cleaned out some old tracking tags that were throwing off our data.

Our rankings have improved noticeably since. We keep an eye on things with Google's testing tools, and just recently we came back a perfect 3 out of 3 on agentic browsing readiness, on top of already scoring 100 for SEO, which was a nice one to see. But really, at the end of the day, it comes down to people finding what they're actually looking for.

Knight Knowledge: Given how prevalent AI is, especially in the computer field, how do you leverage it for your work with web development?

Subject: AI has become a pretty regular part of my workflow. I use it for idea generation, prototyping, and working through tricky bugs. It's a good way to see options I might not have thought of, or get unstuck when I'm staring at a blank page. I also lean on it for analyzing our analytics, generating reports, and spotting gaps in our SEO. I think the important thing with AI is not to just take what it gives you and run with it. Every suggestion, whether it's a code fix, a design idea, or written content, needs to be reviewed and tested before it goes anywhere near production, because it doesn't know your specific systems or your accessibility standards the way you do, and it can get things confidently wrong. Anything that touches a public site should be held to the same bar either way—accurate, on-brand, and actually good, whether AI was involved or not.