Web Content Managers Forum Conference Call

Thursday, June 21, 2007

More than 110 Forum members in attendance

Conference Call Topic: Establishing Good Linking Policies and Managing Internal and External Links

Agenda

Linking Policies: How to develop one and what needs to be included
Notification: When and how should you notify users when they’re leaving your site?
Disclaimers: When do you need them and where do you need to put them on your site? Is there good standard language?
Review process: What’s a good process for regularly reviewing your links so they remain accurate and relevant?
Writing good links: What are good techniques for writing effective link titles so your content can be found by search engines?

News

We’ll announce the Fall 2007 schedule for Web Manager University classes in a few weeks. Registration will open in August. So before then, you should check the schedule and start to work on your funding requests to attend training.
Webcontent.gov will be undergoing maintenance during July, so don’t expect many changes on the site during that time. We’ve been working on several new pages and pieces of guidance, which we’ll share with the group shortly.
Nicole Burton described eye-tracking and invited folks to attend a free demo next Thursday, June 28 in DC. Check the email from Nicole for details.
Usability guidelines on writing good links

What Is A Linking Policy And Why Do You Need It?

OMB Policy Number 3 requires agencies to establish a linking policy which explains how you manage your links, requirements for choosing external links, explains how you notify your users when they are leaving your site, and explains how you periodically review the sites to which you link.

Links you choose reflect on your agency, so it’s important to choose your links carefully. Here are the specific requirements and associate guidance:

OMB Policy requiring agencies to have a Linking Policy
Guidance on developing a Linking Policy
Guidance on developing a link review process
List of Required links

Make sure you don’t have disclaimers when linking to other federal sites. There is no need to this. We’re all subject to the same privacy, 508, and other requirements and don’t want to give the public the impression that they shouldn’t trust information on another federal site. You can notify visitors that they are going to another federal website for informational purposes, but you don’t need a disclaimer. Disclaimers are only required to address linking to non-federal government sites.

There are a number of ways to display and describe your linking policy, several examples can be found on Webcontent.gov. Many agencies work with their legal offices to develop this policy.

“Exit pages” that tell users they’re leaving your site have been found to annoy users. They’re no longer considered a “best practice.” It’s preferable to find an alternative way to explain your linking policies to your visitors. Some agencies have decided that having a general disclaimer in your posted linking policy is sufficient and covers all legal bases. However, some agencies still feel the need to use exit pages which show the policy every time a user leaves their site.

Agencies should establish a process for regularly reviewing their links to be sure they stay current and relevant. Many agencies use “link checking” software to monitor their links. However, software might not catch everything, and doesn’t check for relevance, if the content on a page to which you link changes. So you’ll need to do some additional manual review.

Disclaimers of Endorsement and Exit Pages

There was a discussion about the pros and cons of exit disclaimers. One caller said exit pages have helped reduce the number of requests they were getting to change content on sites that did not belong to them.

But OMB Policy does not require agencies to have exit pages. The policy is more general and leaves it up to agencies to determine the best way to implement. The policy states that agencies must “include reasonable management controls to assure external links remain active or otherwise continue to provide the level of quality (including objectivity, utility, and integrity) as intended by the agency and expected by users.”

Many agencies have determined that it’s more effective to post your disclaimer of endorsement on your “Web policies” page. Users would expect to find it there, and they tend to ignore exit pages anyway.

One caller asked whether opening a new window would be a good method for showing visitors that they’re leaving your website. But research shows this is not a good idea for usability, especially since many users rely on the “back” button which doesn’t work if you open a new window. It’s also a 508 issue, since it’s very hard for folks to navigate back to your site if you open a new window. Jakob Nielsen gives this practice 3 out of 3 “skull & crossbones” – so don’t do it.

The main principle that the OMB Policy underscores is the importance of having a process and criteria for choosing external links. You should be able to justify every external link and each link should add value. Just like any content, more is not always better. We should only post as many links as we can effectively manage.

Examples from other agencies

Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy

Our first guest speaker was Leslie Gardner from the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE). The agency is part of the Department of Energy and focuses on renewable energy. The have many and varied audiences and partners, and lots of external links.

They recently implemented a new linking policy. To notify visitors that they’re leaving the EERE website, they describe the destination link in the link text or description. They don’t have exit pages. For example, they use link text such as “Visit the EnergyStar website for information on refrigerators.” In this way, the link text is the notification that clicking on that link will take you to a different website.

To communicate this new policy, they’re working with all their content contributors. Contributors are responsible for writing link text. It’s a challenge to write meaningful link text. The link should be meaningful, describe where folks are going, and what they’ll find when they get there. They state these “rules” in their posted linking policy.

Resources from EERE:

EPA

Jeffrey Levy described EPA’s linking policy, which deals with external links to any non-federal websites. They have policies posted, and any standards related to the policy.

EPA has rules in place that describe exactly why they link—and don’t link—to non-federal sites. They specifically ban linking to a site that advocates political views, sites that charge fees (with a few exceptions), and any content that has such poor usability or bad design that it would give their visitors a poor user experience. EPA’s linking policy has given them important legal protection and they’ve used it to respond to people who questioned why they were linking to particular content.

They also discourage linking to sites that require visitors to sign up for a membership, ask for donations, or promote lobbying (i.e., “... write to your Congressman on this issue.”). This doesn’t mean that they automatically exclude linking to organizations who have lobbying as part of their mission. But they try to “deep link” to the specific material rather than the organization’s homepage. For example, they might link to the Sierra Club’s page on recycling—if it adds value and provides a service related to EPA’s mission.

To notify visitors that they’re leaving the EPA site, they 1) use link text to describe where folks are going and 2) include a small “exit disclaimer” icon next to the link that goes to their disclaimer.

EPA Linking Policy

USA.gov

Bev Godwin, the Director of Operations for USA.gov, said their mission is to help people find government information. So the site is mostly comprised of links—over 12,000 external links. The public can suggest links to USA.gov on the “Suggest-A-Link” form. That page also includes a link to their linking policy.

USA.gov takes its linking policy very seriously. Besides being a requirement, it helps you decide what’s appropriate or not for the public. Occasionally USA.gov links to non- government sites that either present government information in a new way, or information that’s not available from any government agency. USA.gov also has a “home page real estate” policy that helps their content editors know what links should or shouldn’t go on the home page. The goal of USA.gov is to get folks to the right agency, so it links to broad topics and allows individual agencies to provide specific information. It doesn’t duplicate content.

Lawyers at GSA (which manages USA.gov) helped write the “disclaimer of endorsement” which is used to cover all non-federal links. USA.gov doesn’t use an exit page since it would be extremely frustrating for users to go through this extra step every time they click on a link. The disclaimer includes language such as “GSA does not control or guarantee the accuracy, relevance, timeliness or completeness of information contained on a linked website.”

Sometimes the public emails USA.gov with comments about a website, thinking they are still on USA.gov, but they’ve actually gone to an agency website. GSA will forward these comments to the responsible agency. The burden should be on the government, not citizens, to fix problems on our websites.

USA.gov uses “link alarm” software and a content management system to monitor its links. It now averages only 1% of broken links every day. USA.gov staff must still manually review links to ensure that the links are going to relevant and current websites.

Q & A

Q: What about linking to maps, such as providing directions to a government office? How do you choose a provider to display your maps without showing favoritism of one particular mapping tool? Similarly, if you have a conference and want to list nearby hotels, is it okay to link to those hotels’ websites?

A: One agency said they link to Google maps in a few instances because it was the best mapping software available at the time they built the page. And it’s a free tool, so it doesn’t create the appearance of providing revenue to one company over another. They treat linking to mapping tools the same as any other external link—if it provides a service that is relevant to the agency’s mission, it’s okay. Other agencies try to follow a “rule of three” rule, where they list at least three vendors to avoid the appearance of favoritism.

However, agencies should be cautioned not to drive business to commercial entities. It’s not appropriate to provide links to some vendors over another if it could provide an unfair advantage and give them an opportunity for added business. For example, EPA doesn’t provide a list of hotels when it has its annual conference, since doing so would provide unfair advantage to those hotels over others. However, they do link to the “official” conference hotel if the hotel selection has gone through a competitive process.

OMB doesn’t address this particular situation or dictate down to this level of granularity. They set broad policies and allow agencies to implement in the way that works best for them.

Q: What about links to various social media tools?

This is also becoming more common, where agencies post links to de.li.cio.us or digg if they offer blogs, RSS feeds, and other forms of social media. One way to decide which ones to link to is to look at their popularity and determine what the public is using. Time.com is a good example of a site that shows many examples of how users can “bookmark” a story.

The bottom line is that web managers should use “due diligence” when choosing any link.

Link Checking Tools

Callers mentioned some of the tools they use at their agencies, such as Maximine, Xenu link checker (a free tool), etc.

Best Practices for Writing Good Links

The Web-Based Research Design and Usability Guidelines book has great guidance on how to write good links. You can order the book or access an electronic version of the guidelines on Usability.gov. Chapter 10 has a series of guidelines and research about managing links, which include these best practices:

Write meaningful link labels that include your customers “keywords” (which are often the words that people type in search engines to get to you). Never use link text such as “click here” or “read more.” They provide no value to your users, search engines ignore these links, and people using screen readers won’t know what the link is about. For example, use “Learn how to apply for jobs at EPA” instead of " Click here” for jobs at EPA.”
Link to another website to provide additional content rather than trying to maintain that same content on your site. Find out what the authoritative source is on a particular topic and link to it. This will ensure that your users will get to the most updated version of that content.
Make link text consistent with the destination page. The text doesn’t have to be exact, but it needs to be close enough so visitors know they’ve clicked on the right thing, and gotten to the right place.
Make sure link colors change after users visit them so they don’t end up clicking on something they’ve already seen. Standard best practice is blue, underlined for unvisited links. HHS has done research and adopted red for all visited links.

Next Forum Call

Next month’s call is on Thursday, July 19, 2007, from 11 am – 12 pm EDT.

To propose a topic for a future Forum call, please contact Sheila Campbell at sheila.campbell@gsa.gov or Rachel Flagg at Rachel_flagg@hud.gov.

Page Updated or Reviewed: June 29, 2007