A web standards audit of 105 Australian Government web sites, December 2006

Gavin Dispain

Web site manager, Department of the Environment and Heritage
Organiser, Canberra Web Standards Group

What are web standards?

• technologies and guidelines for creating and interpreting web based content
• developed by groups and standards bodies
  • W3C, AGIMO etc
• benefit both web site owners and visitors by
  • increasing audience reach
  • improving efficiency
• increasing interest in web standards in Canberra and the APS
  • 441 Canberra WSG members (from 112 in February 2006)

The web standards audit

• 1 to 31 December 2006
• 105 Australian Government web sites
  • 1/8th of all Australian Government web sites
• 48 departments, agencies or authorities
• 17 portfolios

Portfolios

Web sites

• aad
• abs
• accc
• accesscard
• afma
• afp
• ag
• agimo
• ags
• ahc
• aic
• amsa
• anao
• anbg
• aph
• apsc
• apvma
• army
• asada
• asic
• asio
• ato
• ausport
• australia
• australianapprenticeships
• awm
• bom
• casa
• centrelink
• chah
• citizenship
• coag
• community
• communitywatergrants
• connected
• connectedwater
• crimecommission
• crimtrac
• cultureandrecreation
• customs
• daff
• dcita
• defence
• deh
• dest
• dewr
• dfat
• dha
• directory
• dotars
• dpmc
• dsd
• dva

Web sites (continued)

• environment
• ephc
• e-strategyguide
• facs
• finance
• ga
• gbrmpa
• gcu
• gov
• greenhouse
• greenvehicleguide
• harbourtrust
• health
• heritage
• hreoc
• humanservices
• immi
• industry
• ipaustralia
• jobsearch
• lebmf
• lwa
• mdbc
• medicareaustralia
• mincos
• movingintowork
• naa
• napswq
• nathers
• nationalcapital
• navy
• nht
• nla
• npi
• nrm
• nsif
• nwc
• oilrecycling
• oipc
• orer
• ozco
• peo
• pm
• privacy
• publications
• smos
• tenders
• tga
• travelsmart
• treasury
• waterrating
• wea

Audit tools - home page analysis

• AIS web accessibility toolbar
  • W3C HTML validator
  • W3C CSS validator
  • WebXact/Bobby accessibility checker
  • Web page analyzer - page weight checker
• Australian Government web site design guidelines
  • consistent user experience
  • web site branding
• all tools and guidelines available online and free to use

Audit tools - web site analysis

These companies generously offered their time and services for the audit

• Maxamine Knowledge Platform - usability analysis
• TextTrust Pro - spell checking
• Hitwise - competitive intelligence and analysis

They are also offering complimentary reports or the chance to win their services

Disclaimer

• automated checks; no user testing
• cursory manual checks; no follow up checks
• Maxamine only scanned up to 5000 objects of each web site using pre-defined standard filters only
• the audit and reports are provided solely on the basis that users will take responsibility for verifying their accuracy and completeness
• no liability will be accepted for any loss or damage that may be incurred by any person acting in reliance on the information in this audit or reports
• the audit was not intended to deliberately embarrass people in this room

Australian Government CUE

Developing a consistent user experience is a strong theme of the 2006 e-Government strategy

A CUE will improve web site functionality and the experience had by visitors

AGIMO recommends that the following appear on all Australian Government web pages (links ideally as HTML lists)

• Australian Government logo
• header: skip navigation, home, about, contact us, search
• footer: copyright, disclaimer, privacy, accessibility (optional)

CUE: branding

• some of the web sites without logos may be exempt
• one web site had an incorrectly positioned logo
• most web sites used the 48 pixel logo

CUE: utility navigation

• slight variations counted; 'about us' 'contact' etc
• 'feedback' not counted
• home links on web pages but not on home pages
• search box or search link counted
• some sites may not need a search

CUE: legal statements

• 'legal notices' not counted
• accessibility notice is optional

Australian Government links

Guidelines for Commonwealth information published in electronic formats version 1.1 (January 2000) state that home pages must have a

• link to the Prime Minister's home page
• link to fed.gov.au

These guidelines have been superseded, however

• 8% of all home pages link to the PM's home page
• 20% of all home pages link to australia.gov.au

Traffic to australia.gov.au

Traffic from australia.gov.au

Search engine traffic

Size of web sites

• Most web sites are large
• Objects include
  • web pages (HTML)
  • documents (PDF, Doc)
  • images

HTML files

PDF and Doc files

Annual reports and budget statements

• quick look only: specific link, publication link, search
• 52% of all web sites had an annual report
• 18% of all web sites had a budget statement
• may not report or may publish on 'parent' web sites

Images

• home page images
  • in total 1763 (6 MB) images
  • overall average of 17 images per home page
  • finance had 72 and ozco had 71 images
• web site images
  • overall average of 12 images per web page
  • industry averaged 53 images per web page

Home page DTD

• a DTD defines the rules of a version of HTML or XHTML
• 77% of all home pages had a DTD
• quarter of all home pages had no or a malformed DTD
• HTML 4.0 and 4.01 counted together

Valid home page HTML/XHTML

• pages without DTD could not be validated
• 27% of home pages had valid HTML
• total 2181 HTML errors
• most errors minor e.g. unescaped ampersands

Most home page HTML errors

Deprecated home page HTML

Home page CSS

• 95% of all home pages used CSS
• 66% of these CSS files did not validate
  • 43% contained errors
  • 23% would not validate
• small HTML and metadata errors or CSS hacks can prevent a CSS validating
• most errors could easily be fixed

Home page accessibility

• automated validation only - manual checks and user testing is essential
• 78% of home pages used scalable text
• few errors on each page (maximum of 2 A, 4 AA and 7 AAA)
• most errors could easily be fixed, e.g. missing alt attributes

Inaccessible WAI A home pages

• accc
• afma
• anao
• army
• ato
• centrelink
• chah
• coag
• crimtrac
• dest
• dotars
• ephc
• gbrmpa
• gcu
• harbourtrust
• health
• lwa
• mdbc
• medicareaustralia
• oipc
• ozco
• privacy
• wea

Page weight

• immi heaviest home page 799 KB
• dial up download time 1 s to 58 s
• total home page weight 9.3 MB
• average web page size 16 KB to 163 KB
• apvma largest web page 23 MB
• total data scanned by Maxamine 38.3 GB (8 DVDs)
• total redundant data (HTML, images, documents) 664 MB

Links

• 100,616 broken internal links (links within each web site)
• 67,380 broken external links
• average number of links per web page
  • 8 (army) to 169 (customs)
• total non-duplicated links (internal, external, document)
  • 83 (greenvehicleguide) to 86,437 (mdbc)

TextTrust Pro spell checking

• TextTrust spell checked 400,000 web pages
  • from 5 pages on nathers to 57,882 pages on ato
• six web sites had no spelling mistakes
• best performing web site (least number of spelling mistakes per total number of web pages) was an existing TextTrust client
• on average, one spelling mistake for every 22 web pages
  • 59% of web sites performed worse than the average
  • 43% of web sites performed better than the average (including 6% without spelling mistakes)

Commonly misspelt words

Least spelling mistakes

Most spelling mistakes

Maxamine visitor rating

• Calculated by considering web site
  • page weight and proximity
  • redundant file control
  • external and internal link integrity
  • accessibility
  • metadata compliance (DC.title only)
  • title and keyword integrity

Best visitor experience rating (%)

Hitwise relative web site rankings

Hitwise monitors the behaviour of three million Australian Internet users

• during November 2006, Australian Internet users visited
  • 143,608 Australian web sites
  • 2379 government web sites (includes foreign web sites)
  • 567 national government web sites (includes foreign web sites)

Highest ranked web sites

Lowest ranked web sites

Web site visit duration

Longest and shortest visits

Summary: major issues

• there is increasing adoption of web standards, however
  • a quarter of all home pages had no or a malformed DTD
  • only about a quarter of all home pages had valid HTML/XHTML
  • two thirds of CSS contained errors
  • about a quarter of home pages did not validate to WAI A
  • lots of opportunity to improve AA and AAA compliance
  • most traffic comes from search engines - SEO is important
  • many common words were misspelt
  • many heavy images and home pages could be optimised
  • many broken links and linking to australia.gov.au could be increased

Summary: poor performance

• why are there these issues?
  • many large web sites
  • lack of time and resources to commit to adopting, monitoring and maintaining web standards?
  • redeveloped versions of web sites may be about to be launched?
  • some CMS may not produce web pages that meet standards?
  • need to educate executive and other decision makers?
  • lack of policing or recognition and reward for complying?
  • focus on user testing, writing for the web and improving IA instead?

Reports

• Maxamine are offering you access the usability reports they ran for this audit
  • to get your report email your web site to pbarker@maxamine.com.au
• Hitwise is offering a complimentary industry report
  • to get your report email karl.hayes@hitwise.com
• TextTrust have given you a sample of the spell checking reports they ran for this audit
  • to get your web site spell checked again visit www.texttrust.co.nz/public/free-trialdu.aspx

Questions

• Paul Barker from Maxamine and Karl Hayes from Hitwise are here to answer questions about their products and services during the break
• should AGIMO or ANAO regularly run a similar audit?

Prizes

• TextTrust are also offering one year of free spell checking to a web site that was part of this audit
• the prize includes weekly and on-demand spelling error reports
• all reports are reviewed by editors - only real errors are reported
• TextTrust handles all versions of English including Australian English
• customised dictionaries can be developed for words or acronyms to be excluded from the reports
• the Word Alert feature allows specific words or phrases to be found on a web site should they need to be changed

And the winner is ....

Notes

• 2006 Australian Government web site audit data (XLS - 180 KB)
• please complete the Canberra WSG 60-second survey
• for invites to future WSG meetings please join the WSG
• presentation built using Eric Meyer's S5