The perfect page…
A lot of my focus at work lately has been about how we publish to the web – who’s doing it, with what tools, and to what standard.
While the boss is focusing on what goes up when and how to make it more engaging, I’m mainly working on three things:
- building the platform: merging two big government sites into one, as a shared service to merge many more
- building the people: making sure we’ve got an efficient and professional content management operation
- building the process: setting up governance to ensure quality and best value for the organisation and customer
Underpinning all three of these, I’ve been working in my spare time on a checklist of quality criteria for web pages. (You know me, I love a good document). Feel free to grab it in PDF or Excel if you’re interested in taking a look:
I’ve got my doubts about its practical application day to day, so I thought I’d share it here and get your feedback. It builds on work I did at my last place, owes a teensy bit to the much meatier Directgov equivalent, and has had some input from the guys in my team. But it’s also only a draft, was written outside work hours and is in no way an official publication from my employer, OK?
Here’s what I’m trying to achieve with this, if it flies:
- make it clear to everyone who creates or edits pages on the site what’s expected of them
- provide a basis for light-touch quality checking of their work
- bring a consistent and fair approach to giving feedback on skills and output
- show senior colleagues the breadth and importance of proper web content management
- help audit incoming content when sites are merged
So what say you? Useful or likely to be ignored? Too detailed or not detailed enough?
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I know nothing about proper websites, so can’t really offer much in the way of feedback – other than it seems really sensible and straightforward stuff.
But top marks for sharing!
The successful application of all of these rules will depend largely upon how much your application/framework/CMS helps and guides the user through the process of creating and maintaining a document (page).
More and more tools are surfacing to help with this. You mention readability, but that is something which can be crudely measured ( Google: Flesch–Kincaid ) scored, and fed back to users.
Correct eGMS markup can be divined from the document content and suggested to users.
The process of ACL ( access control ) can be better fine tuned so that gatekeepers’ tasks are less onerous.
“User G has submitted another article, you have approved 90% of his past articles so unless you say otherwise this article will be automatically waived through and published in 59 minutes ..”
Listing and prioritising individual items which make up a good document is one thing, policing it is another.
Good software should be helping and guiding users to to achieve this, I’d turn my attention to finding that software if I were you.
Paul – I would love to get my hands on a workflow system that learns from previous user actions and a decent metadata suggestion tool. Do you know any products that can handle that kind of thing? I’ve never seen anything that comes close to being this whizzy, but maybe I just don’t know where to look.
Cyberdoyle – thanks, we are trying! Sharing stuff publicly helps.
There is nothing out there that I have seen that deals with these issues.
I ran my own CMS for a local gov outfit for 10 years, and had built in much of this type of usability – and had demo’d proof of concepts for other stuff besides.
All of this is possible _if_ you are designing the CMS for a vertical market.
The big vendors operate in horizontal markets – at a fundamental (framework) level the CMS will also have to be reused as base for a shoe-shop, and a dog charity, song vendor etc etc with different skins.
I don’t believe the UK gov meta data space has moved on too much, its still IPSV based AFAICT, as long as you START WITH meta data, and build your CMS on/around it, all the GUI (UX) implementations are trivial by comparison.
Rarer that rocking horse dung to find an employer/client who’ll buy into that POV though.
Auto publication of content based on track record is perhaps a romantic rather than practical concept — humans ain’t that consistant.
That said, it’s easy to achieve this in say WWF (MS) using simple rules. This would amount to measuring achievements of past acceptability rather than *learning*. Sadly, I don’t think user G will fly.
Good work though, your document makes for a good check list for most organisations managing large quantities of communications and addressing many audiences.
Also enjoyed Steph Gray’s proposal that .gov could one day be a collection of blogs. Money saved, relevance maxed!
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I like the idea of auto publication based on track record. And the quality assurance checklist is really helpful, thanks for that.
Hello, I'm Neil Williams. I'm a government web geek, a dad, a husband, a grower of veg, a keeper of hens and a lapsed comedy writer, roughly in that order. 
Interesting and starting to restore my faith in EGov… It is cool that people like you are doing this sorta stuff, especially outside work! I would always add KISS to any list. But I am not an expert so can’t offer any real input, apart from good wishes and
Good luck.