Our publishing standards

Please don't hesitate to contact the web team with any questions, or if you have any problems in using our site. We will be glad to hear from you:

Making sure that the site is easy to understand – plain English

Except for downloadable documents, nearly all the information on the website is edited and approved by a small team of editors.

Authors throughout the council are helped by web coordinators from each department. These coordinators have a crucial role in making sure that text is easy to understand, and that everyone fits in with our house style. In turn, they are supported by the editorial team.

For most documents that are intended to be read onscreen, new standards began to apply from May 2011. These aim to make them easier to read, and compatible with screen-reading software used by people with a visual impairment.

Our site is checked every year by the Plain English Campaign. They look at the organisation and design of the site as well as the headings and language we use. We are pleased to have been awarded their website Crystal Mark since 2005. Read more about plain English on the Plain English Campaign website.

Making sure that the website is accessible and easy to use

Having a small, specialist team of editors means that we can make content easy for visitors with disabilities to access.

Anyone with a disability should still be able to use and navigate the site without unnecessary problems. For example, headings and links can be structured so that blind people can use their screen readers to scan a page, and those who have difficulty controlling a mouse should have good-sized links to aim at.

We aim to meet the AA standard of the international Web Content Accessiblity Guidelines 2.0.

Making sure our site is up to date

There are thousands of pages on our site. Each page is checked at least every six months to make sure that it is still up to date.

We also create special seasonal pages about holiday activities or publications. If we need to draw your attention to new information around the site we can create ‘Latest' announcements at the top relevant pages, or add an announcement to our home page.

Our site is also checked for broken links every five days.

Open data

We want to make sure that the information on our site can be re-used by others in ways that benefit the community. For example, people with the technical knowledge could create maps or share calendar entries: