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Web standards

Website standards address common policy issues and practical challenges that organisations face in providing services online.

Standards are important for a number of reasons:

• They help you comply with legal requirements (e.g. disability access).
• They provide better security for your website and users of your site.
• They ensure consistency between sites in such things as basic user interface (e.g. usability).
• They make it easier for search engines to find information on websites (metadata).
• They help to ensure user confidence in online services and encourage further use of the internet.

Some standards that will be relevant to the websites of nonprofit organisations are covered in this section of the site.

See this guide to the Australian Government’s recommended minimum website standards

Usability

Usability is a term that you will hear quite a lot about in relation to websites. It is a measure of how easily people manage to do and find what they want on a site and how easy they find it to navigate around/the site.

Good usability is closely correlated to how well the site achieves its goals.

With a website, you need to make it easy for first-time users – few sites have such regular visitors that they can be expected to learn (and remember) complex site-specific procedures. Visitors to most sites can be divided into two broad groups:

• those that are browsing or ‘surfing’ the site
• those using the web purposefully to get some key information that they know they want.
• Sites should be designed so that both groups of users can get what they want from the site.

Good usability includes:

• clear navigation (often referred to as information architecture)
• clear design and layout
• concise, easy-to-read content
• clear, consistent use of forms, buttons and plug-in applications
• a technical infrastructure that allows fast download times and works on a wide range of browsers and operating systems.

All aspects of a website should be designed with usability as a paramount consideration.

Usability checklist

There is a growing field of research that looks at how people use websites and what they find easy and what they find confusing. If your site has good usability, you should be able to answer yes to the following questions:

Architecture and navigation

• Does the structure fit the purpose?
• Is the navigation scheme clear?
• Where are you? How do you find what you want?
• Is it clear where to go next?
• Is information easy to retrieve?
• Are there a reasonable number of choices in the navigation bar?
• Do link names match page names?
• Are links clearly marked?
• Is there a clearly marked link back to the home page?
• Is there an option to search for information?
• Is there a site map?
• Does every page have standard identification elements?
• Does the user have control over navigation?

Layout and design

• Is layout consistent on all pages?
• Is excessive scrolling minimised?
• Is there a main display area on each page?
• Does the layout work visually?
• Is there proper use of alignment and grouping?
• Is there proper use of contrast?
• Does it look clean and uncluttered?

Content

• Is the text clear and concise?
• Is there minimal use of jargon or acronyms?
• Is text organised in small chunks?
• Is spelling and grammar correct?

Forms

• Are dialog methods concise and consistent?
• Are there clear submit and reset buttons?

Platform and implementation

• Is download time fast enough – do pages load in 3-10 seconds?
• Do all the links work?
• Are there broken images?
• Are pages written to be found by search engines?
• Does the site work with all supported browsers?
• Does the site work on all platforms?
• Does the homepage display fully on a screen with 800 x 600 resolution?
• Does the site work on resolutions from 640 x 480 to 1024 x 768?
• Are standard rather than non-standard plug-ins used? e.g. Adobe Acrobat Reader, Windows Media Player.

Accessibility for people with disabilities

Accessibility on the web means making your website usable for people with disabilities.

Web accessibility is growing issue and, apart from its moral imperative, has the force of law behind it. Under the Commonwealth Disability Discrimination Act the goods and services you provide on your website must be accessible to all members of the community, including those who have disabilities.

More than one in five Australians has some type of disability. As our society grows proportionally older, the need for disability access will increase along with these numbers.

Here are some examples of how a website can affect people with disabilities:

• a blind or sight-impaired person may use a screen ‘reader’ – a piece of software that reads content on a web page aloud. This software is often ‘confused’ by image maps, frames , java scripts and other web design elements that have not been properly configured for them. PDFs which are strictly image rather than text files are also difficult for screen readers.
• a person with poor eyesight can’t read a web page if the site doesn’t allow them to increase the size of the font in their web browser.
• a deaf person requires a text version of audio information that is available on a website to be able to use the site as designed.
• some people cannot perceive certain colors correctly, and may not be able to see light-colored type on colored backgrounds.
• someone with limited hand movement may not be able to use a mouse or hold down more than one key on their keyboard at once. Well designed web menus provide alternative navigation methods.

Designing a website to be accessible to people with disabilities is simple and costs nothing if it is done as you build your site. It also makes good sense. Making accommodation on your site for the greatest number of users increases the availability and usefulness of those materials and increases your potential audience by millions of users.

You will find that a more accessible site benefits users beyond those with disabilities. Just as wheelchair ramps were created for people in wheelchairs and those who cannot otherwise use steps easily because of an impairment, they are also used by people pushing strollers, people with young children, mail carriers pushing bins of mail, and many others.

The lesson here is clear: the computer tools you develop with accessibility in mind will probably serve a much broader audience.

Accessibility guidelines

The World Wide Web Consortium (WC3) has created guidelines for website accessibility. The highest priority guidelines are:

• Provide alternative text for all image type buttons in forms (this is known as ‘alt’ text).
• Provide text equivalents for every non-text element, including but not limited to images, scripts, animations, audio and video.
• Ensure that all information conveyed with colour is also available without colour, for example from context or markup.
• If an image conveys important information beyond what is in its alternative text, provide an extended description.
• For tables not used as layout, such as spreadsheets, identify headers for the table rows and columns.
• If the submit button is used as an image map, use separate buttons for each active region.
• If a data table has two or more logical levels of row or column headers, use markup to associate data cells and header cells.
• Provide alternative content for each SCRIPT that conveys important information or functionality

Metadata

Metadata is about identifying key words that make it easier for search engines to find information (see also Search engine optimisation: making sure users can find your site) Metadata is the ‘back-end’ structured information that you provide about each page on your website.

Metadata can be compared to a library catalogue record that facilitates discovery of a particular work by providing information such as title, author, publisher, subject, description of the work, location, etc. Likewise, metadata makes it easier to discover and use an agency's resources online by providing information that aids and increases the ease with which information can be located by search engines such as Google.

Australian Government Locator Service (AGLS)

With increasing volumes of information on the internet, the Australian Government has attempted to establish a metadata standard for both public and private sectors known as the Australian Government Locator Service (AGLS).

Having standard metadata makes it more likely that similar items on different websites will be described in a similar fashion and that search results will be sufficiently refined and at the same time will exclude material that is not required.

While an organisation needs to invest resources in creating quality metadata, the returns on this investment are considerable, in terms of access to resources for users and greater manageability of these resources in the organisation.

Pros and cons of PDFs

The use of PDFs (portable document format) (those documents you click on and which open up – sometimes after a long wait – in Adobe Acrobat Reader) has grown rapidly in recent years. In putting content on your site you will often be faced with the choice of using web (HTML) pages or a PDF.

If you can, the best choice usability-wise, will be web pages. These are the language of the web, they are easily searched by search engines and are accessible.

Some of the problems of PDF files are:

• They are typically converted from documents that were intended for print. The user is faced with a long slab of text that takes up many screens, is unpleasant to read and which has no internal navigation.
• PDFs live in their own environment with different commands and menus to the web. Even simple things like printing or saving documents are difficult because standard browser commands don't work.
• You have to wait for the special reader to start before you can see the content. Also, PDF files often take much longer to download.
• PDFs are actually ‘image’ files. This means that they breach accessibility guidelines for disabled users.
• Because the PDF file is not a web page, it doesn't show your standard navigation bars. Often users have trouble returning to your main site.
• Searching is problematic at best with PDFs. If a search engine picks up a PDF it will deposit the user at page 1 when the information searched for is on page 75.
• PDF layouts are often optimised for a sheet of paper, which rarely matches the size of the user's browser window. Often a page will be in two columns which means you have to continually scroll up and down.

However there is another side to the argument. The reason PDF usage has grown so quickly is because:

• they provide a stable format that can be accessed independent of varying platforms, browsers, word processing software etc
• they are relatively easy to create
• they provide an easy method of providing a large volume of information on a website quickly. For many nonprofits, the choice will not be between putting a document on the web as a PDF or as HTML pages, but between a PDF and not putting the information online at all.
• if the user needs to print out a document, a PDF gives a better result
• where a document has a print existence (for example a report or booklet), the PDF mirrors that print document with the same format and pagination. This means if you are citing or quoting that document there is no confusion between the web version and the print one.

The ideal solution is to provide a document online in standard web pages with a PDF version available for those that want to print it out.

Another possibility to get around the accessibility problems is to provide a Word or text file which can be easily accessed by screen readers.

If you must use PDFs rather than HTML for large documents, then make it easy for the user. Provide a short ‘gateway’ webpage summarising the content of the PDF and with a link to it. This means the user can scan that page and decide if they want to go to the trouble of downloading the PDF.

You can enhance usability by getting public search engines to guide users to the gateway page rather than to the PDF file itself. The one downside is that your site will have slightly reduced search engine visibility since some query terms will occur in the PDF's full text, but not elsewhere on your site.

XML

XML is the next-generation of HTML, the computer language used to write website pages. XML is a special standard computer language that allows content to be re-used and even shared between websites. XML stands for ‘eXtensible Mark-up Language’.

XML is now regarded a key standard in the web world and the main way information will be exchanged in environments that do not share common platforms. If you are purchasing a content management system you need to make sure it supports XML. You may not want or need to share content at first, but all content management systems nowadays should give you the option.

The most common use of XML is Really Simple Syndication ( RSS ) a simple way of sharing content. RSS feeds allow you to bring into your website or desktop the headlines of stories on other sites such as news sites.