eGovernment for Development

Maintenance

Contents

How Do I Maintain The Contents Of My eGovernment Website?

Like any other website, an eGovernment website is only useful if the information it carries is accurate and up to date, i.e. if this information can be used effectively to facilitate present or future relations between your organisation and the public.

In order to publish information that is accurate and up to date, you will need to obtain the commitment of your content contributors to regularly produce contents for the site, and also to review these periodically, if this is possible.

You can help this process by setting "expiry dates" for specific, time-sensitive items of information, such as transitory regulations, or items linked to deadlines, and more in general by organising a regular schedule for updates to specific sections of your site. It is likely that such a schedule will depend on the production of new information elsewhere, be it within your agency or outside it. It will therefore help if you can formally link the review of web contents to the production of such information, so that web editing becomes part of a wider information workflow within your agency, or between this and other organisations. Sometimes this will take some mediation effort, as modifying workflows may impact on the work practice of departments or other groups of staff that lie beyond your sphere of control: in these cases it helps to have the backing of senior figures in your organisation, who champion your web project and recommend its full implementation.

The other main driver in the maintenance of your contents will be feedback from users . By keeping track of enquiries received through the website, and providing website-specific feedback channels (e.g. using forms that users can fill), you will be able to collect impressions and suggestions on how contents can be improved, or on any problems arising from them. It may also help to keep a record of the words users input into the search engine on your site, as this can provide an idea of what users are looking for, as can running surveys with users (more on this in: How Do I Evaluate My eGovernment Website?).

Finally, you should consider that the life course of a piece of online information does not end when you take it offline: especially in governmental settings, where the information on offer is likely to have legal value, it is essential to provide archival facilities for old/expired documents, up to a certain amount of time. This will enable you and your agency to establish exactly what information was published at a specific time in the past, providing you with key evidence in case of legal disputes or other problems connected to the contents you publish.