A Constitution for a new website
I’m working on a brand new web site for an organisation that doesn’t sell anything, but needs to communicate clearly to a range of audiences, from government to members of the public.
As you’d expect, there’s a lot of healthily competing requirements from different organisational stakeholders – and, as all of my readers will know, websites designed by committee serve nobody’s interests, especially not the users’.
So I’ve written a Constitution for the new website – a (hopefully) simple explanation of principles that all can agree, and from which more detailed policies can be derived. It deliberately doesn’t try to get very detailed (as it’s for a broad cross-section of the business), but if a subsequent policy contradicts something here, it is unconstitutional and can’t be adopted.
I publish it for your interest – and would love to get any feedback on it from any budding Alexander Hamiltons out there.
Added 4 November 2006: A few people have emailed me and asked if they can adapt and use the Constitution for their own sites. The answer is yes (and thanks for having the courtesy to ask). It’d be great if you could post your amended versions on your sites and link back here (and add a comment here linking to your version) so there might develop a body of best practice.
Web Design Principles
- The user is sovereign. The site must be designed around user needs, not organisational structure or operational convenience.
- Wherever possible, users should be consulted in formal user-testing. (Those of us within the organisation rarely have the same needs or expectations, and are therefore rarely reliable proxies.)
- Aesthetic design is subservient to function. Aesthetic design is subjective. Where internal stakeholders cannot agree, user-testing should take place.
- In both design and content, simplicity beats complexity,increasing the range of devices that can be used to access the Site (including old machines and mobile browsers). Therefore, any proposed technological bells and whistles must have a demonstrable value to visitors.
- Wherever possible, the technologies needed to receive the website should not be tied to one vendor, and should be free of charge to the user. The code that runs the website must conform to the rules of the various languages used.
- Site must be credible and trustworthy. This means:
- Clear contact information.
- Information must be citable and bookmarkable.
- All content on the site must be:
- Accessible to people with disabilities. Where this clashes with aesthetics or organisational convenience, it trumps them.
- Written for the Web (written for scanning and reading on screen not page)
- Content current, with dates; old material must
not remainbe deleted, or archived in a manner that clearly identifies its status. Content must only be published in one place, so versions are trustworthy. (Technology allows user to choose format of delivery). - Easily findable (through navigation, site search, and web search)
- Written for audience. (Eg, tone difference between press release vs. news, government visitors and general public).
- Clearly written, for quick comprehension by all, including those with English as a second language.
You might also like the Expert Author’s Markup Guide (PDF), which we wrote to help business users to structure their web content before submitting it to the web team (thereby encouraging a “web-friendly” style).
Two years after I wrote this, I left the SRA and wrote up how the re-design process went in Standards-based corporate web development.
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18 Responses to “ A Constitution for a new website ”
Hello Bruce.
These are great points. How about something that mentions accessibility in terms of mobile devices?
Got to say I really like this idea, and again am going to have a think around trying this approach out on some upcoming projects. I like the sounds of it – a statement of principles.
Maybe something about finding out who the users are first, rather than assuming?
“The code that runs the site should be elegant.”
Elegance turns unintelligble spaghetti code into something that can be understood and made accessible to hordes of bedroom coders.
Excellent!
A few comments / suggestions:
* I’m not sure old material should always be removed — for some things it’s very useful to maintain an archive. The important thing is surely that such stuff is marked appropriately, and doesn’t “get in the way” when users are looking for current stuff.
* Is the “code that runs the website” refering to backend CMS stuff, or front-end HTML+CSS stuff? I read it as the former to start with, but now I’m thinking it’s the latter. Whichever it is, it would perhaps be useful to make it a bit clearer.
Just thinking about Metadata: this will be of help in searching. I don’t think you necessarily want to define the metadata you must have, but simply to say that any web pages must contain appropriate metadata in order to help people searching find it.
A personal bugbear that I think more sites should adopt is that all information should be DATED (whether visibly or via metadata). Often you arrive at a page via searching and it’s difficult to tell how up to date it is (e.g. you’re wanting to find out something to do with accessibility AFTER the result of a particular court case was known)
This is a very useful idea – and one I will definitely tack on to the requirements spec. that clients to agree to.
A couple of things occur to me:
If anything I’d like to simplify the language even more. Some of my clients would glaze over when they read ‘Aesthetic design is subservient to function’. I haven’t come up with the right words yet, but it’s something like ‘The design of the site should help people to use it, not hinder them’, or something.
Secondly, could ‘Written properly’ and ‘written for audience’ be included under the main heading ‘Written for the Web’? Having items about writing under two separate headings is a bit distracting.
Oops, this could end up like a document designed by commitee…
I program my home computer / beam myself into the future
I wish that this had been around several years ago when I took on the “Monster”!
Kudos for the brevity and the common sense approach.
I agree that accessibility for users with disabilities is desirable and should be an important consideration, but I’m not sure that I agree that it should trump everything else. ‘Organisational conveniences’ include cost and timescale and sometimes there may be a conflict in meeting the different needs of all users, especially where a site is designed to deliver a specialist service or to serve a specialist user group.
But maybe that’s just an argument for customising constitutions to the project.
Something we’ve been thinking about for a while, as we run/design a large website for a community at Durham Uni, where the webmaster (content editor, basically) changes each year based on a vote.
[…] had buy-in from the board. Having convinced the top brass of the need for accessibility we wrote a “constitution” for the new site that says all content must be accessible to people with disabilities, and where this clashes with […]
[…] had buy-in from the board. Having convinced the top brass of the need for accessibility we wrote a “constitution” for the new site that says all content must be accessible to people with disabilities, and where this clashes with […]
Fantastic stuff.
A stroke of true genius to get agreement on a document of this nature up front.
No doubt, this will save a lot of head banging later on in the project when two conflicting interests arise.
With your kind permission, I will be using something based (either loosely, or not-so-loosely) on your strucutre for all my future projects.