EPA Web Procedures and Standards October 26, 2010

How to Find Them EPA’s Web Guide

EPA Web Procedures Ensuring Access to EPA Information on EPA Servers guidance/epa-servers Protecting Content during Web Site Development guidance/protect-dev-sites

EPA Web Procedures External Site Links guidance/external-links Complying with epa.gov “Look and Feel” guidance/look-feel

External Links Do not add an exit tag to other federal government web sites. Use the common code in the procedure. Do not create your own exit tag or a local copy of the image. Check your links quarterly, per OMB policy, to be sure that: –They are still active and not broken. –The page being linked to has not been replaced with something inappropriate. –Easy fix – check maxamine QA reports monthly for broken links and inappropriate links.

Do not add exit tag to other federal Web sites example

Complying with epa.gov “Look and Feel” Template 4 is for: –New sites –Sites who have talked with OEA and gotten approval to go through the redesign process.

Complying with epa.gov “Look and Feel” You can update your site in Template –Add new content as needed –Treat your ROT Verify and republish existing content Update/rewrite outdated but still useful content Outdated content that still provides useful info gets disclaimer Remove obsolete content

Search Problem: –Setting up Search for an area using Template –Search fails Resolution: –We’ve removed area search from the templates Implement poorly Users didn’t know what an area was and were searching a limited set of content Template team and search team believe that when you search, regardless of page, should get the same results –If using an older template, check your search parameters

Search cont. Problem: Overarching homepage does not include subareas in search Example: Water shouldn’t just search the area for it but also OWOW, OGWDW, OST, OWM Resolution: If you’re responsible for an overarching subject homepage, check that the search is looking across all the websites that are related.

Standards: Common Errors

Contact Us Page Contact Us Page. Requires a link to a separate page with contact information. The problem: –The template just has a # sign in the code. The contact us link isn’t added. The link doesn’t work. –People go to a working page and use the wrong contact us link. –Questions are not sent to the content managers. Solution: –Create a Contact US page. –Update the link to the page in the two places in the template.

Contact Us Page Problem: Form requires an address. There’s a requirement that people can submit information anonymously. Solution: Don’t make the address field required To avoid spam: Use the type in a word to submit option. People do have to provide an address if they want to get a response.

PDF Linking The words matter. Helps people know what they’re going to get when they click on link. Helps search engines –Link text counts as text in the target document. In fact, "Keyword- focused anchor text from external links" is the single most important factor in relevance calculations. – Peter Buch, EPA searchmaster

Examples What NOT to do: –Title changed to protect the guilty. Brochure 8 pp, 2.1MB –Title changed to protect the guilty. PDF (24pp. 890K) What TO DO: –Title of document (PDF) (24pp. 890K) –Title of document (PDF) (8pp. 2.1MB) It’s OK to repeat the title twice, if you have two formats. –Title of document (Word) (8pp. 200K) –Title of document (PDF) (8pp. 2.1MB)

Graphic File Size Problem: posting a large image and controlling size by setting width and height. –Customers have to download large images. –Images largest source of download burden. Slow to load pages can blame images most of the time. Solution: Resize the graphic file in a graphic program. –Compress as much as possible without degrading quality.

New Icon Functionality is now part of EPA’s mother javascript. Directions to use are part of the new icon standard. guidance/newicon

JavaScript Used to enhance Don’t provide content using JavaScript Content or HTML elements that only make sense with JavaScript available must be created by JavaScript

At EPA that means 59,080 requests/day from people with JavaScript turned off –September’s average successful requests for pages per day: 2,954,007 –2% average US browsers have JavaScript turned off (Estimate from Yahoo!) –FYI: the US had the highest rate of users with JS turned off

Example with JavaScript

Example Without JavaScript

Contact: Judy Dew Office content/infrastructure coordinators