WSG Presentation - 18 Jan 07
January 23rd, 2007These are my notes from the presentation I gave at the 7th Canberra Web Standards Group meeting, 18 January 2007.
I spoke about the Navy internet website - the current version, the next version and problems we’ve had.
Over the next few weeks, I’ll be doing more detailed posts (including code examples) for most of the cool things in the current version.
Introduction
- navy.gov.au
- Improvements
- Obstacles
- Future
- Opportunity to share
- Pool public-service webmaster resources
Background
- Me
- Navy’s internet Web-Manager, part-time
- Navy’s small web team
- Content supplied to us
- We control the code
- Our website
Current Version
- Launched November 2005
- Recruiting is very important
- “Make it sexy”
- To who?
- All potential recruits?
- No, only to Navy Headquarters.
- New content management process
- Centralised maintenance + A few custom tools = No need for CMS
- Not as effective for distributed authoring systems
Efficient Maintenance
Standards Based
- Semantic XHTML
- Page title & meta-data generation
<title>
Commanding Officer - HMAS ANZAC (Royal Australian Navy)
</title>
<h1>Royal Australian Navy</h1>
<h2>HMAS ANZAC</h2>
<h3>Commanding Officer</h3>- Well, nearly there…
Source Control
- Subversion (TortoiseSVN Windows client)
- Logs all changes
- Helps meet archiving requirements
- Unlimited development copies
- Smart change-conflict resolution
Rapid Maintenance
- No layout markup
- Header, column break and footer includes
<?php include("files/header.html"); ?> <h2>HMAS ANZAC</h2> <h3>Commanding Officer</h3> <p>Lorem Ipsum.</p> <p>Dolor si Amet.</p> <?php include("files/break.html"); ?> <img src="images/co.jpg"alt="Commanding Officer" /> <?php include("files/footer.html"); ?>
- Pages parsed for:
- Email obfuscation
- Page title & meta-data generation
- Editplus will facilitate easy upload
Gallery Mass Uploader
- Put original photos into a local folder
- Run script that automatically:
- Resizes and optimises the images,
- Creates thumbnails,
- Extracts descriptions from the metadata,
- Zips it all up,
- FTP’s it to the server,
- Unzips on the server and
- Adds the photos to the database.
Other Helpful Features
Google Public Service search
- https://services.google.com/publicservice/login
- Not-for-profits
- Better than previous Google options
- Familiarity, in our template, without adverts
Custom 404’s
- When a page doesn’t exist, 4 types of feedback:
- Internal broken link
- Locally cached version
- Link from external site
- Incorrect user inputted link (or bookmark)
- Redirection from .HTM to .HTML
Help-bot
- Scans contact requests and offers suggestions
- Decrease in commonly asked questions
- Accurate suggestions to 80% of 400 tested
- Frees time within our team
Issues
- Told a company will redevelop the website
- No knowledge of web design
- Navy’s never followed a user-centred process
- They weren’t concerned
- We stayed on the offensive
- Had to educate them both
- We won… for now
Future
- Launch mid-2007
- 9th version of navy.gov.au
- First to address user needs
- User research
- Stakeholder interviews
- User testing
Improvements
Working with identified Business Goals
- Serve public and inform about organisation
- Generate interest in the Navy
- Entice new recruits
- Make applying easy
- Defence Force Recruiting works for all services
- navy.gov.au still required as a recruiting tool
- Reinforce values and brand
- Honour, Honesty, Courage, Integrity & Loyalty
Inform
- Useful, accessible content
- Lower bandwidth
- Degrade gracefully
- Fully Standards based
- Most content not updated often
- Written for different audiences and mediums
- Rewritten for the web
- Some content needs to be updated frequently
- Nobody willing to own content generation
Entice
- Conform with brand
- Promote values
- Entertain
- Series of online games, interactives and TV shows
Assist
- All elements user-tested
- More business-operations online
- Financial transactions online
- News scraper
- Content shared with Defence Force Recruiting
- Users shouldn’t have to leave one site to get information maintained by the other
- All recruiting information should be able to be accessed through navy.gov.au
Central Point of Contact
- Navy information found in:
Richer Visual Experience
- Integrate content photos with gallery
- Photos will link to information about their content
Guest Authors
- Creating a community
- Moderated blog-style posts with guest authors
- Public and personnel contributions
- “Did you know” style teaser from homepage
Web instead of a Hierarchy
- Tags allow each page to have multiple labels
- Wiki-style, cross-referenced content
Conclusion
- Keen to hear about shortcomings
- Share our techniques and tools
