As the race to get online hots up, the sheer volume and ambitiousness of businesses and marketers to be seen and to expand from main sites to microsites for targeted campaigns, as well as bread-and-butter product information and rich media content sites, the whole panoply need to maintain a structure approach to quality control and best practice.

Whilst it’s not quite the Wild West out there in Web world anymore, much still remains to be done to make sure sites are robust and fit-for-purpose. "It’s all about web site and quality monitoring and website compliance" explains Magus’ Simon Lande. "We have an application which helps, typically, large organisations – those with multi-editorial, multi-site environment, who have a set of standards and guidelines that they want to make sure are enforced online – we can take those guidelines and convert them into a set of electronic checkpoints, and for every page on every site, validate where there hasn’t been various levels of compliance."

According to Lande, this approach has led Magus to work with industry standards setters, helping the wider industry tap in to their knowledge. "As a result of having a lot of expertise in that, we work with BSI, the British Standards Institute steering group," Lande says, "that brought together the combined expertise in the industry to produce a best practice process document."

Magus’ Lande believes that there are a lot of benefits that can accrue if standards are implemented correctly. "It protects the brand," he stresses, "and you get a good return on investment on your web-spend, but, if you’re really struggling with the logistics of the issue, we produced this specification (PAS 124) which is all about defining, implementing and managing web site standards."

With PAS124, Lande says that Magus’ work has to date been about putting something back into the industry in terms of best practice and process to help people get the maximum amount out of their web site operations and the maximum return on investment, and to deliver a good and effective user experience.

"From our commercial point of view, the fact that we’re the lead consultants on this PAS 124 process means that for organisations that need the operational aspects of how to manage these standards – and we know a fair amount about standards because we’ve been at the centre of this BSI project in addition to our own direct work with clients - it’s a really powerful application that can really help you become, if you like, a web site quality leader" says Lande, "making sure you are delivering the best possible user experience on the one hand, and streamlining and maximising your operational site management on the other."

For web content management rollout, the benefits are two-fold, Lande asserts. "Where it touches on content management, is that essentially, there are two elements: what the standard does is make the most out of your CMS system, such as, what should be locked-down in the CMS, what should be left flexible, how to get the balance between globalisation and localisation issues; but the reason we developed this application is that there is this perception that people have, if I lock everything down in my CMS and I define the templates correctly, then I’m not going to have a compliance issue, because everything’s resolved in the CMS" he says.

According to Lande, a lot of CMS companies give that impression. "The reality is, that doesn’t happen," he says. "And it’s not even really supposed to happen, and the reason is the CMS will lock down the top level components such as navigation and architecture, but the content areas, where the editors actually work, it’s not practical or workable to lock down every element of that because the system will become unusable and people will find it hard to manage."

The solution, Lande believes, is not as complex as you might think. "So what you have to do is leave it open, and give them the guidelines which then mandate exactly how you should use the open areas" he says. "Our position is that you then use the website quality monitoring to ensure compliance with the guidelines. So it’s sort of picking up where the CMS leaves off,"

On a slightly more controversial note, Lande thinks the truth is better to explain up-front than for users to have unrealised expectations of what a new WCM system can and cannot do. "What your CMS will never do’ – that’s not a criticism of the CMSs," says Lande, "it’s just that this is not what they are designed to do, this is what they are designed to do working on the boundaries between the two. In fact, the closer we can align with CMS companies, the better" he says.

Magus is currently working with CMS vendors such as SDL Tridion already. "We are integrating our compliance monitoring solution with their CMS so that people have both the production capability and the monitoring capability.

All we are saying, is give PAS a chance

PAS124’s relevance to CMS organisations is a win-win for web content management, Lande says. "What BSI has not produced is a new web standard – there are a plethora of web standards out there, W3C, accessibility etc., people are really struggling with how to go about making the most of these – what the PAS124 document does is provide a best practice framework for processes, defining standards, how do I go about that, which ones do I need, which ones are applicable to me; implementing standards – how do I role them out, how do I communicate them on an ongoing basis."

"There’s another PAS - PAS78 which relates to accessibility, and that is now going to the next step to become an official standard. If PAS 124 gets the traction and the momentum, it could evolve towards a sort of quality standard." Lande believes this could be the first step. "Either a content management company has to go upstream to provide compliance monitoring we’re doing, or build it in."

For more on PAS124, go to Magus’ web site at www.magus.co.uk  



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