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Top 10 Best Practices for Government Websites
1. Meet all laws, requirements, policies, and other directives for public websites
2. Document your governance structure, including roles, relationships, responsibilities, rules, and review processes
3. Develop, document, and implement a strategic plan that both incorporates visionary changes and corrects problems with web content
4. Focus on top tasks
5. Create and manage content effectively and efficiently
6. Collaborate within your agency and across government to manage content and eliminate duplication
7. Follow usability best practices
8. Evaluate the effectiveness of your website
9. Make sure the public can find your content
10. Create opportunities for the public to interact with their government
Jeffrey,
Timely reminder. Thank you so much. I have some research to do.
I frankly think that # 10 is the most important, but I suppose #1 to 9 have to be done first.
Common sense?
Common sense, Adrian, but it’s good to get validation we’re on the right path.
Also, it’s great to revisit strategy, governance, and content management practices on a regular basis to ensure that these framework elements are keeping pace with the rapidly evolving world of the web. The 2009 web is a world away from where we were just a few short years ago.
Adrian, you don’t have to look very hard to find gov’t sites that don’t come close to meeting these.
Thanks for great info.
I find it is somehow difficult to locate the required information via the EPA site, either the search result returns too many records, or the search result does not really match the search criteria. Hopefull, the WebCMS will improve the search funciton overall.
Agreed, John. We have an Information Access Strategy now, after a year of talking to the public and various specific groups. One of the top items is improving our search. And yes, the metadata we’ll create as we move into the Web CMS should help a great deal!