Structuring content

We follow Government Web Standards to make sure our content is available to everyone, including people with disabilities.

Read more about Government web standards on digital.govt.nz

• We try to make headings under 60 characters. Google only displays 50-60 characters of the title in search results.
• Because the URL is taken from the page title, we shorten the URL if the page title is lengthy.
• Words in the URL should be separated with a hyphen ‘-‘.

Example:

https://www.orangatamariki.govt.nz/working-with-children/programme-and-forums/services-in-schools/

• We use a maximum of 200 characters (no spaces) for page summaries
• At a glance, the page summary should tell the reader what is on the page and whether they are in the right place for the information they’re looking for.

Example:

We work with and fund programmes and services that provide support to families and communities. Our programmes and services vary in their approach because different people need different things at different stages of their lives.

We also add a summary to each file when it’s uploaded to the website. The summary is displayed if the file is added to a page file using a ‘ALOT’ block.

• We make each summary a maximum of 160 characters
• We make sure it provides more information than what’s in the ‘Title’.
• If the file is used within a ‘list of files’ block on a page, we check that the file summary makes sense in context with the other information on the page.

Find out about our file naming conventions.

Jump links appear at the top of pages and provide hyperlinks to the content block headings further down longer web pages.

• We use jump links for a minimum of four and a maximum of eight jump links.
• Content block headings displayed on the page become the jump link text.
• If the page has more than eight jump links (or content blocks) consider splitting the content into different pages.

We use the “ALOT” block to add files to pages. 

The Information sharing page has examples of several ALOT blocks being used in different sections of the page.

Information sharing

The Service Specifications page is an example of a single ALOT block being used to list files.

Service Specifications

We link to videos on YouTube via the URL.

Video transcripts and captions

• We don’t publish videos unless they have captions added and a transcript.
• We format the transcript according to best practice.

Read the guidance on the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) website for the best practice regarding transcripts.

Transcripts – making audio and video media accessible – WAI website