New year and getting things in order

January is a natural time for clearing out the old and bringing in the new in many different aspects of life.

When it comes to websites, now is a great time to get things in order. This starts at the very top and with governance.

What is website governance?

Website governance is the overriding structure of people, policies and process which ensures the effective and secure management of a website to meet its goals.

How does it work?

Website governance has 4 core strands:

• People – clearly defined roles of what people do and what they are responsible for in relation to the website.
• Process – How everything happens – updates, content creation, approvals, changes, updates and issues.
• Technology and Infrastructure – platforms and systems to help meet the organisation’s digital objectives.
• Policies – Legal such as GDPR, internal including brand blueprints, tone of voice, accessibility.

Within each of these strands are many key areas. These include design, site speed, security, compliance, analytics and content management.

It’s really important for organisations of any size to have in place a formal governance for their website. It gives a robust approach to ensuring that the website is working to its full potential, everyone understands the part they play and that security is maximised and risk is mitigated.

If you don’t have governance in place, now could be the time to establish one…

Keeping with the theme of new year, and a time to get organised, have you looked at the content on your website lately?  It’s easy to launch a website and just leave it.  But this isn’t the way to get the best from your website. It’s an integral channel in your organisation and content management is a key area within the ‘processes’ strand of website governance.

Regular content reviews should be undertaken to ensure that your website is absolutely reflecting the key messages of your organisation.  Images should be refreshed, links checked and regular content added to news and blog sections. If you are in a sector which has specific cycles or seasons, are you bringing this to life on your website and driving more appeal and relevance to potential customers through regularly changing content?

Need help? We regularly post advice about content generation and content management.  Read one of our previous blogs here.

Another area to focus on earl this year is data. If you collect data through your website, you must have a process as part of your governance structure to ensure that you are regularly reviewing whether you have a valid and transparent reason to be collecting that data, that you have the correct permissions and that you are storing the data securely. Data collection via your website is usually an automated process and its requirement can quickly become out of date or its existence forgotten. GDPR sets out the legal requirements around the collection and use of personal data. Click here for more details.

Starting the year out establishing or re-visiting the governance you have in place for your website is a very good idea. Coupled with starting to tackle key areas such as content management and data clean up can make a huge difference to your organisation.

If you are stuck on where to start or what to do, give us a call. We are Olamalu, technical experts and website developers. We’re a friendly and down to earth team based in West Oxfordshire, who work together to achieve brilliant outcomes. We’ve been developing websites and designing tailormade tech solutions for nearly 16 years.

We work with many of our clients as an ongoing technical partner, but we also offer a consultancy service to solve a specific strategic challenge.

Can we help you to put in place an effective website governance structure? Get in touch!