Optimising website quality and compliance

Any organisation that wishes to present a consistent brand identity or look and feel across a web estate has to contend with a key problem: how do you give editors the flexibility they need to make the most of your publication platform whilst still maintaining your standards?

At one end of the scale, too much flexibility can allow your editors to compromise your brand by adding content that doesn’t comply with your brand standards or policies such as accessibility or SEO. At the other end, workflow and creativity can suffer from putting in place too many restrictions.

• CMS lockdown: Many companies resort to locking down their templates and restricting access to CMS formatting options. However, an environment which is too tightly controlled becomes over-complicated, unwieldy to use, and expensive to maintain.
• Pre-publication signoff: Another common approach is to introduce signoff procedures so all new content is manually vetted before it goes live. This creates a publication bottleneck, and can restrict the volume of fresh, timely content being published onto the websites.

Common challenges and requirements:

• Providing editors with the flexibility they need to do their job effectively without putting your brand at risk
• Streamlining the publication workflow to remove bottlenecks
• Ensuring all editors understand your brand and quality guidelines and how to implement them on the site
  

ActiveStandards will help you:

• Monitor your brand and quality standards, including logo treatment, brand colours, fonts, content presentation rules, template rules, prohibited terms and phrases
• Increase the number of editors with publication rights, without negatively affecting quality
• Streamline your publication workflow, and ensure new content created for the website meets your standards
• Communicate and reinforce your standards and template rules
• Prioritise error fixing, so editors can use their time most effectively
• Monitor editor performance, and identify where additional training is required
• Benchmark all your sites internally for quality and compliance, helping you drive change and improvement

 

Ensure that your global team share an understanding of your standards and best practice expectations. Your web standards and policies should form a core part of your training and your quality and compliance programme.

Our website standards experts can help you define and document your standards and policies for your organisation, that is easy to use and actionable.