Building a Better Website

Developing and maintaining a user-friendly Website is nevereasy. But when that site?s content comes from a range of governmentsources?each with its own procedures and proprietary information?things becomeeven more complicated.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)bypassed technical and bureaucratic obstacles to create an easy-to-use yetauthoritative source for consumer information on vaccinations. The key to thesite?s success is content syndication, which allows content owners to controland update contributions while maintaining a consistent look and feel.

?Before we built Vaccines.gov, information on vaccines wasscattered over a variety of sites,? says Dick Stapleton, deputy director of theWeb and New Media Division in the Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Officeat HHS. As a result, a person who was searching for ?vaccination? could haveended up at a site that was totally off the mark.

The government?s new vaccine site, which launched in March2011, combines content and expertise from across HHS divisions?including theFood and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Centers for Disease Control andPrevention (CDC)?and puts that together in sections that are easy to browse,including ones devoted to health travel tips and a ?Who & When? vaccineguide.

?The site?s content is organized around consumer need,?Stapleton says. ?That?s a significant variance from most other governmentWebsites, which are organized by what I call the bureaucratic structure. Aconsumer looking for information on immunization and vaccine safety shouldn?thave to know that the CDC does this and the FDA does that.

?When you?re developing a topic-based site, the criticalfirst step is to inventory what content exists, and then marry that to ananalysis of the kind of information consumers are looking for. When you put thetwo together, you look for holes and you fill them?and then you?re off andrunning.?

But without an innovative Web-publishing strategy, Stapletonand his team might not have run very far. ?When you do your inventory and findpieces of content scattered across different Websites, the issue becomes howyou bring that in so the person or organization that?s the expert on thecontent still maintains ownership,? he says.

Traditionally, a Website developer would cut and paste datafrom the pertinent sources, but that information can easily get out of sync.For instance, if the CDC revises its vaccination guidance or the FDA issues aproduct recall, the other HHS Websites might have out-of-date or incorrectinformation. 

To avoid that, ?We built a syndication engine that wouldallow us to bring in content from a number of different sites and keep itcurrent,? Stapleton says. ?So, if we want to include material on a particularvaccine from a page on a CDC site, CDC syndicates it to us. Its content appearson Vaccines.gov?with the look and feel of our Website?but CDC continues tomaintain it.? If the CDC revises its guidelines, the changes are madeautomatically on Vaccines.gov.

This is also a good way of circumventing turf battles. ?Itgets you away from the argument that says, ?It?s my content; I want it on myWebsite,?? Stapleton explains. ?Content doesn?t leave anybody?s Website. Wejust bring the most pertinent parts of it together on ours.?

Stapleton and his group at HHS brought in Aquilent to serveas the site?s lead developer. ?Aquilent played an enormous role, starting withthe wireframe design and the graphic look and feel,? he explains. ?Besidesdeveloping and publishing the Website, they did all the migration andsyndication of content.?

The way the site?s syndication engine works is simple:Aquilent built an API, then set standards for content tagging. ?That?s it in anutshell,? Stapleton adds.

According to Stapleton, ?One of the things that a projectlike this will reveal are discrepancies when one office is saying one thing andanother is saying something else. So plan to spend far more time than you everthought you?d need to get agreement on content.

?Any comprehensive Website requires strategic planning fromthe beginning. The management of the project is as important to its success asany piece of technology, good writing or pretty graphics.?

The next stage of syndication will enable Vaccines.gov tosyndicate the site?s content. ?Doctors? offices and state health departmentscan take our content and put it on their own Websites, with their own look andfeel,? Stapleton explains, ?and it?ll all be seamless and invisible to theuser. In essence, we?re building a storefront that will list our syndicatedcontent in a way that?s easy to search and share.?

The way Stapleton sees it, Vaccines.gov is the wave of thefuture. ?Government has got to reorganize its content for the consumer,? hesays. ?The success of that depends on the ability to collaborate acrossagencies?and syndication is the tool that allows that collaboration to takeplace by letting agencies share their content without giving up their sites.? 

 

Maria Behan is a freelance journalist with a background intechnology and business.