Weeknotes, 17 Aug
Updates Information Architecture Content Accessibility
This was a busy week with many areas of the project progressing, and a sad one, as we said goodbye to Sazia on our team, who has moved on to another role. A snapshot of what we got up to this week is below…
Site map
Following the agreement with W3C on site map level 1 categories, Sazia has been looking at the core content more closely and started re-arranging it to fit these categories. We went through the site pages to see where content can be merged, created or made redundant.
This led us to revise our sitemap and go deeper into level 2 and 3 categories. This site map was agreed with W3C and we have started preparing to test it again on Treejack - specifically to see if it works to onboard new users.
Content design
W3C and Studio 24 know there were areas of the site with content needing more thought. Because there is not time to think about every page, we prioritised the most important areas to work on. Some of these will be user-flows and/or wireframes, some of these will go straight into design, but all of them will have extra thought as to what content should be on the page, and in what order, to meet user needs. These areas are:
- New User Onboarding
- Navigation (logged in and logged out)
- Values / Mission Page
- Industry Landing Page
- Standards Landing Page and TR
- Group Landing Page to Detail Page
- Homepage
On Wednesday we presented our first work on content design around New User Onboarding, Values / Missing Page and the Industry Landing Page to the W3C core team. Generally these were well received with a few specific comments to be addressed.
URL strategy
On Thursday, we had a meeting with the W3C Systems Team to go through our recommendations on the URL strategy. Vivien and Gerald from W3C were supportive of most recommendations, with a few areas to be investigated further.
CMS choice and accessibility
It has become apparent to us that most CMSs have not done much work, if any, to ensure their software is accessible for CMS editors. This is rather a sad state of affairs, and it means our accessibility criteria for choosing a CMS has changed from finding one that fully meets accessibility guidelines, to finding a company willing to work with us and W3C to iterate their software to improve authoring tool accessibility.
We’re currently liaising with our preferred CMS platform to see what accessibility fixes are feasible in the short-to-mid term.
Final thoughts
What was good: seeing the content come together into wireframes - it feels like the site is starting to take shape!
What we found challenging: fully understanding how hard it will be to find a CMS that meets all our functional, non-functional and accessibility requirements and realising we may need to compromise on some areas for launch of this phase.
What are we looking forward to: building on the content work and seeing the next pages / user flows emerge.