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PAS 124 2011 is an end-to-end guide to defining, managing and implementing web standards.
What we thought would be tremendously beneficial for everyone in the industry – experts in
governance and compliance, the people building websites, the people managing websites, the
people using websites – would be to harvest the collective intelligence of everybody from
the user side to the build side to SEO, accessibility, usability and put down in a serious cohesive
framework. If you are serious about improving your website, this is the code of practice,
the framework, you need to define standards and policies, to implement them and to manage
them. Sites are more complex now. There’s multi-editor,
there’s multi-channel, there’s multi-source, there’s social media involved. There are
so many developing touchpoints and technologies involved that it is becoming harder and more
essential to manage standards out there. We’re talking about fairly large brands
that have a web presence which is characterised by having more than one site. They are multi-site
and typically have a lot of content on there. They are managed by multiple editors. There
are lots of people publishing to these websites, often in multiple languages.
What you find now is that brands have become quite mature in the traditional space. Where
I think there is still quite a disconnect is in understanding how you roll out that
brand vision, that commercial vision, through everything that you do as a business. Standards
allow you to align your organisation and the processes within it to deliver a clearer view
of what the brand requires. If it wasn’t there we’d have to have our
own version of it. It’s a fantastic starting point for us to make sure that we get our
ducks in a row and that we understand where our weaknesses are, where our gaps are and
where we have to have focus. As a Head of Content, web governance and compliance
is a really important issue. We have over 300 devolved users – content editors – so
it’s very important that they’re following standards and complying with our guidance.
I think PAS 124 is going to be very important in the coming years. It signals that websites
have come of age and now need governance. They need the same order that we have in every
other part of our business, and in terms of government every part of running our public
services. Also I think it is going to increase the quality of what people experience.
Within our portfolio of sites we have nearly 2000 websites. To try to adopt those policies
and standards across all those sites is a huge undertaking.
First of all, at a strategic level the issue of website governance has emerged much more
strongly, people are starting to get what it’s about. We formalised that within the
2011 version. It wasn’t even mentioned in the 2008 version which shows how far things
have come. The issues of how to manage a complex multi-site, multi-editor, multi-lingual web
presence has increasingly become an important issue. We’ve also seen a lot of incremental
change in issues to do with how people are addressing accessibility, usability and SEO.
Mobile has come more to the fore so we have addressed that more. All the standards that
were addressed in the original version have either been incrementally or substantially
updated. I think PAS 124 is very strong in that it
acknowledges that there are a lot of business challenges that can seem quite insoluble – for
example the tension between flexibility and control – and a process can bring to bear
some form of discipline around that without taking control out of the hands of day-today
users. I think one thing that stands out in PAS 124
is the fact that it is an official document, official guidelines that an external body
has validated and a group of industry experts has put together.