[LINK] Australian Government Digital Business Website

[Tom Worthington]

Senator Stephen Conroy, Minister for Broadband, Communications and the 
Digital Economy, launched digitalbusiness.gov.au on 8 December 2010: 
<http://www.digitalbusiness.gov.au/>.

This is intended to provide practical advice for small businesses and 
community organisations on establishing an online presence. The Minister 
described this as a ‘beta’ site still in development and invited input, 
so here is some:

Test results:

1. W3C Markup Validation Service: passed the home page as HTML5. This is 
the first website from government I have seen using the new version of 
HTML. The government is to be congratulated for trying it out: 
<http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.digitalbusiness.gov.au%2F&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=Inline&group=0>.

2. W3C mobileOK Checker: Unfortunately the home page only scored 35% for 
mobile compatibility. One of the primary reasons for using HTML5 is so a 
web site will work with mobile devices. I suggest the government aim for 
85% for this site. One of the points to be made to business is that the 
use of mobile web is increasing rapidly. A point to make to small 
business, is that you do not have to spend money on having a special 
mobile phone web site or iPhone/iPad "app". You can simply have your web 
site made mobile compatible: 
<http://validator.w3.org/mobile/check?task=2010121402460356.mobile2&docAddr=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.digitalbusiness.gov.au%2F>.

3. Accessibility: Unfortunately the home page did not score well on a 
TAW automated web accessibility test (WCAG 2). 33 Problems were 
detected: Perceivable 27, Operable 5 and Robust 1. None of these is a 
particularly serious or difficult to fix: <http://www.tawdis.net/>.

4. Page Design: The home page has a good design, with useful text well 
placed and restrained us of graphics. There is a main menu with some 
icons used, but the icons appear to be purely decorative, not 
communicating useful information. The designer might want to consider 
using some standard pictogram which have established meanings.

3. Purpose of the site: The web site provides a good high level 
introduction to what an Internet presence is, why a business should have 
one and how to go about getting one. But it is not clear why the 
Australian Government needs to provide this information for private 
businesses.

The web site goes to the point of recommending three software products 
for web site development. Two of the products are from for-profit US 
based companies and one a free non-profit tool. There appears no good 
justification for the Australian Government to recommend that Australian 
companies buy imported products, thus worsening the $22B ICT trade deficit.

Also in providing advice on selecting a website designer, the Australian 
Government does not appear to recommend choosing trained and qualified 
ICT personnel (such as ACS Certified Professionals). What might be more 
useful would be for the government to simply refer businesses to the 
advice AGIMO provides for government agencies on use of the Internet, 
which is broadly applicable. There is no real need for the Australian 
Government Digital Business Website.


-- 
Tom Worthington FACS CP HLM, TomW Communications Pty Ltd. t: 0419496150
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617, Australia  http://www.tomw.net.au
Adjunct Senior Lecturer, School of Computer Science, The
Australian National University http://cs.anu.edu.au/courses/COMP7310/
Visiting Scientist, CSIRO ICT Centre: http://bit.ly/csiro_ict_canberra