1.3: Website Content
Ensure that website content is readily accessible, updated, accurate, and routinely improved. Other Information:
How does your Agency currently ensure that website content is readily accessible, updated, accurate, and routinely improved?
The Commerce Office of the Chief Information Officer conducts a Web certification survey that requires the Commerce operating
unit (OU) CIOs to attest that their Web sites comply with Commerce Web policies. The OU’s Chief Information Officer (CIO)
certifies annually to the Department's CIO that all Web sites of their organization comply with the Department's Web policies,
located at www.osec.doc.gov/webresources. If any deficiencies exist, the certifying CIO shall provide a plan to bring the
Web sites into compliance. OU CIOs must further identify the associated, current IT security plan for the servers hosting
these sites. The Department's CIO will determine whether the proposed approach is acceptable, and retains the authority to
shut down any site for non-compliance. These policies incorporate OMB-related policy concerning IT accessibility, IT privacy,
domain name policy, offsite notification, and evaluation of information before publication. The Commerce Searchable Web Page
policy requires tags to describe Web content, use standard meta data and provide a search capability on all major pages. All
Commerce Web content is subject to the Commerce Information Quality Guidelines that ensure the integrity, utility, and objectivity
of all data disseminated by Commerce. Before publishing information on Web sites, Department of Commerce organizations must
ensure that the content is appropriate for dissemination and that the proposed level of access is appropriate to the content.
The Evaluation of Information before Publication policy requires DOC organizations to make a two-step evaluation before publishing
any information to the Web to evaluate the information for content appropriateness; and to evaluate the information to determine
the appropriate level of access, e.g., Internet, Intranet. These steps entail balancing the mission-related value of dissemination
against the potential risk of publishing the information at a particular level of access. No information should be published
to the Web unless there is a mission-related business purpose for doing so. If a mission-related business purpose does exist,
that purpose should be balanced against any risk posed by publication.
Indicator(s):
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