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Government Website Minimum Requirements and Best Practice - Department of Business and Innovation

Prepared by the Victorian Government's Department of Business and Innovation, Central Web Team - Version 2.0, 23 August 2011

Executive Summary

The Department of Business and Innovation - DBI - Website Minimum Requirements and Best Practice topics describe the standards required for the basic operation of its websites and other online services in a standards-compliant manner. They are aimed at business users, content owners and web managers.  The emphasis is on processes and standards rather than implementation advice or technical guidance.

Each topic clearly describes DBI's minimum requirements – what must be done to achieve compliance – as well as best practice – what can optionally be done to improve the quality of an implementation.  Links to additional information are also provided.

Introduction and context

The Department has had a centralised content authorship model since 2004, with websites edited, managed and published through the Central Web Team.  However, a number of Business Units are choosing to maintain and publish their own content on highly specialised and specific websites.

With an increasing number of Business Units choosing to manage the content on their websites, DBI identified a need to review existing policy documents and develop new standards and best practice for web content, applications and publishing processes.

Context: Website Management at DBI

The Department’s Web Governance Framework was developed and implemented in 2004, establishing a highly centralised content authoring and publishing model. In 2005, the Department commissioned a set of policy and procedure documents to support this model and document current and future practices within the Central Web Team. These were revisited in 2008 as Website Minimum Requirements and Best Practice (MRBP) topics.

Whereas the original project was to document specific policies and procedures for interacting with the Central Web Team, the brief in 2008 was to identify the topics that were required for the basic operation of the sites in a standards-compliant manner. This included the requirement for site managers and content owners to seek approvals at key points during the website lifecycle.

This project was commissioned by DBI in 2011 and encompasses significant revisions to the earlier topics as well as development of new topics for new content types and a set of guidelines for use of social media.

The Central Web Team remains the custodian of Web policy and practice within DBI. It has joint responsibility for the Business Victoria website, primary responsibility for the DBI Corporate website, and acts in an advisory capacity for other DBI websites.

The Central Web Team is the owner of this document.

Audience

These topics are designed to be applied directly – that is, to be read and understood by content owners and producers as well as by staff involved in the planning, development and management of a DBI website.

Websites in scope

These Minimum Requirements and Best Practice topics apply to all public facing websites within DBI.

While many topics in this document have been redeveloped from existing website policies developed in earlier iterations, the document also contains a number of completely new topics.

Topics Covered

  • Apps for mobile devices
  • Audio files & podcasts
  • Blogs
  • Facebook & other social networking sites
  • Flash applications
  • Flickr (photo sharing)
  • Form interfaces
  • Forums
  • Images (including graphical maps & charts)
  • Interactive online maps
  • Links
  • LOTE content
  • Microblogging (including Twitter)
  • Mobile-friendly websites
  • Moderation
  • Newsletters
  • Page size
  • PDFs & other downloadable document formats
  • Polls & online surveys
  • Real-time online chat
  • Registration
  • Responding to the public
  • RSS feeds
  • Terms & conditions
  • User-generated content
  • Video & vodcasts
  • Web analytics
  • Website tools & widgets
  • Wikis

Further Information

The Government Website Minimum Requirements are available in

Please contact administration@egov.vic.gov.au if you require more information.

Added: 12 October 2011 Page views: 1,509 Rating: 0 Votes: 0
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Last updated: 7 December 2011
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Government Website Publishing Guide - Department of Business and Innovation

The guide's specific focus is web content. It provides some general rules of usage, presentation and spelling.

The guide helps to:

  • establish a basic set of conventions to help keep the language, look, feel and meaning of each page of the site consistent, no matter how many writers are involved in the creation of content
  • set a consistent standard for the presentation of content elements such as headings, text, links and images
  • set a consistent standard for the way content is written
  • set a standard way to write commonly used words or acronyms across the site
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  • provide guidance on the presentation of content to aid in Search Engine Optimisation of a page
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Added: 14 October 2011 Rating: 0
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