BEST PRACTICE EXAMPLES The report cites a number of best practice examples in the categories of: -Accessibility -Usability -Information delivery -e-Services delivery
http://www.e-government.govt.nz/docs/ready-access-2004/index.html
ON GUIDELINES
The interesting thing about the NZ guidelines is that they are (roughly) 2-parts strategy to 1-part technical. They identify that successful web-based communication is driven by satisfying audience information or service needs, supporting common tasks, etc. Particularly with larger organisations this vision and strategy-led approach should in future yield some positive returns.
Fingers-crossed that staff-turnover in the public sector doesn't increase ; )
POLITICS
For a number of government organisations, web-communications are the subject of internal conflict. The formal 'ownership' of the website; e.g. what gets published, what stays on the homepage, etc. is often not influenced by the webmaster. The information services teams are often caught between communications and operational drivers and issues of (new) technical sophistication / code validation / standards etc. become an additional burden to juggle.
IMPLEMENTING STANDARDS
The first e-government site I worked on was circa 1996, version 3 browsers, little-to-no CSS, etc. Many government organisations were then using FrontPage (FP) as an authoring/publishing solution (as the transition from word-processing packages to FP was relatively painless). Not intending to excuse the responsibilities of web admins, but the transition to clean-code, structure and CSS is often a backward step for those used to visual-editors.
In recent experience, i.e. pitching for e-Govt contracts there is an increased awareness of usability and accessibility standards, so expect the roll-out of a few more compliant sites in the next year or so.
-- Andy Kirkwood | Creative Director
MOTIVE | web.design.integrity http://www.motive.co.nz/ ph: +64 4 3 800 800 fx: +64 4 970 9693 mob: 021 369 693 93 Rintoul St, Newtown PO Box 7150, Wellington South, New Zealand ****************************************************** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/
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