This post kicks off a four-part series on web governance. A strategy fueled by people, process, and technology. See part two titled People: The Foundation of Web Governance.
Your website is one of the most visible representations of your organization that you will ever have. So, making sure your content is accurate, accessible, and well-maintained is critical to ensuring users will trust what they find. Well-thought-out and well-developed web governance strategies, policies, and processes will provide you with the structure, tools, and accountability needed to keep your website reliable.
Web governance is much more than just publishing content. It's about defining who owns the site, how decisions are made, and how quality is maintained over time.
What Effective Web Governance Looks Like
A successful web governance program relies on three interconnected areas:
People
Clearly defined roles, ownership, accountability, and ongoing training provide the basis for effective governance. When everyone understands their responsibilities and has the skills to comply with accessibility, content, and quality standards, organizations can maintain consistency, reduce risk, and create a culture of shared responsibility.
Processes
Applying documented workflows for creating, reviewing, approving, publishing, maintaining, and retiring content, guaranteeing consistency, accountability, and quality throughout the content lifecycle.
Technology
Technology provides the systems and automation that enable governance to scale, helping teams monitor quality, enforce standards, and streamline ongoing website management. Tools that support governance include automated accessibility testing, link checking, content inventories, analytics, workflow management, and reporting.
With the DubBot app, you can create custom policies that integrate directly with your web governance framework. These custom policies can include checks against your organization’s style guide and content standards, as well as best-practice policies and more.
How Effective Web Governance Works
Effective web governance includes a range of activities that support the quality, accessibility, and integrity of a website. Some of these activities are:
Content Audits
Regularly scheduled website content audits will ensure it remains accurate, relevant, and valuable to users. Review pages for outdated information, duplicate or redundant content, broken user journeys, poor-performing pages, and inconsistent messaging. Use audit findings to recommend updates, consolidation, archival, or removal of content to improve usability, search performance, and overall content quality. This is a great use case for the DubBot app with custom policies.
Accessibility Management
Ensure all content is accessible to people with disabilities, inclusive, and compliant with the accessibility regulations and standards governing your organization. Conduct automated and manual accessibility testing, identify and remediate accessibility barriers, provide guidance and training for content authors, review new and existing content for compliance, and establish processes that make accessibility an integral part of the content creation and publishing workflow.
Quality Assurance
Verify that all published content meets organizational quality standards before and after publication. Review pages for broken links, spelling and grammar errors, formatting inconsistencies, missing or inaccurate metadata, incorrect or outdated images and documents, and technical issues that could affect the user experience. Implement quality control processes and routine reviews.
Note: This list is in no way exhaustive. Please see Building a Successful Website Governance Framework for more in-depth information and guidance.
Why Web Governance Matters
Without web governance, websites can accumulate outdated information, broken links, accessibility barriers, inconsistent branding, and conflicting messaging, among other issues. These issues reduce user trust, increase maintenance costs, degrade search performance, and deliver lower-quality information to AI systems that increasingly rely on websites as authoritative sources.
Organizations that invest in effective web governance are also investing in their people. Clear content standards, accessibility guidelines, and regular training give writers, marketers, developers, designers, and other content creators the knowledge and confidence they need to create quality content from the start.
Effective web governance is one of your best strategies for building trust, maintaining accessibility, and ensuring your organization's digital presence stays accurate, accessible, and remains a trustworthy, reliable source of information throughout its lifecycle.
This post kicks off a four-part series on web governance. A strategy fueled by people, process, and technology. See part two titled People: The Foundation of Web Governance.
Resources
- The Website Governance Modeling Tool
- The Website is Dead. Long Live the Website
- Web Governance report will combine Policies (DubBot Help Doc)
- Building a Successful Website Governance Framework
A human author creates the DubBlog posts. The AI tools Gemini and ChatGPT are sometimes used to brainstorm subject ideas, generate blog post outlines, and rephrase specific sections of content. Our marketing team carefully reviews all final drafts for accuracy and authenticity. The opinions and perspectives expressed remain the sole responsibility of the human author.
