A report on the NSW Government Website Style Directive forum

Date: 30-Aug-07
Author: Belinda Lego

Tuesday 28 August 2007, Art Gallery of NSW

There was a full-house for WIPA’s first Sydney event – a forum on the recently released NSW Government Website Style Directive.

Around 70 people from government and industry attended the Art Gallery of NSW to hear Dana Anspal (NSW Chief Government Information Office) and Craig Morony (NSW Food Authority) discuss the Directive and take questions from the floor.

Dana Anspal provided an overview of the Style Directive including rationale for its introduction, compliance reporting process, and covered common questions agencies have asked about the new style. Dana also discussed how agencies can provide feedback and become involved in GCIO’s reference group.

Craig Morony shared his experiences from the perspective of a small government agency implementing the Directive on the Food Authority’s website.

Craig outlined the Authority’s branding direction, website redevelopment process and both the advantages and challenges the Directive presented. He also spoke of the resources required to customise templates and accommodate deeper navigation structures.

As anticipated, attendees were keen to put questions to both speakers with topics including accessibility requirements, web standards, metadata, usability testing and expansion of the Directive to cover things such as blogs, wikis etc.

WIPA would like to thank Dana and Craig for presenting and also thank Jonathan Cooper and the Art Gallery for hosing our inaugural event!

Recent WIPA event:

Usability and Eye Tracking Seminar

An afternoon seminar with Dr Peter Brawn and Dr John Eklund on the latest eyetracking technologies and the challenges of ensuring usability during Agile Development.

The seminar was held in Canberra, Sydney and Brisbane.

Some of the comments received:

  • "Excellent! Incredibly interesting content"
  • "I found the seminar useful, particularly the eye-tracking content as a tool for improvement in usability and design for the web."
  • "I found it an interesting and economical afternoon (I paid my own registration). The presenters kept my interest all the way along and I'm very glad that I attended."
  • "I found the workshop useful especially the presentation on agile project management and usability."