Dynamic industrial water minimisation benchmarking tool delivered as an Internet website, a pocket reference and on CD-ROM.

		Home page	Benchmarking graphs	User data submission

Ashact Ltd(1), one of the UK's leading process design and environmental management consultancies, and BOCC successfully bid to research and develop a tool to provide businesses with a clear and simple method for monitoring performance in terms of water use, both in-house and compared to others in the same sector on behalf of Energy Technology Support Unit (ETSU).

The Envirowise programme(2), formerly the Environmental Technology Best Practice Programme, was set up by the Department of Trade and Industry(3) and seeks to improve environmental performance whilst increasing the competitiveness of UK industry by encouraging the take-up of good practice technology and techniques.

Ashact Ltd undertook the data research, assessment and project management with advice on data design by BOCC. Once the large amount of data research was complete, the second phase of the project was developed providing access to the tool in a printed pocket guide, online using an Internet website and as a distributable CD-ROM.

The site structure and initial content were defined by Ashact and BOCC advised on accessibility and usability issues. BOCC developed the graphical design and dynamic techniques for users to submit and compare their own water usage with others in their own industry sector. Sector names and Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) codes can be used to filter the data and the output is created as dynamically generated graphs and downloadable data sets. Users are encouraged to send their own data for subsequent validation and possible incorporation into the tool.

The following techniques relating to accessibility were implemented during development:

• embedded page map
• access key enabled
• W3C Web accessibility initiative (WAI) AAA standard(4)
• passes Bobby AAA test(5)
• text format emails
• no reliance on client-side scripting (e.g. JavaScript)
• no plug-ins required
• no dynamic HTML
• PICS rated(6)

and BOCC's graphic and system design considered usability issues such as matching the ETSU corporate standards, that the website and CD-ROM should be interlinked with Envirowise main site, that hyperlinks are embedded in text (not solely in navigation sections of the page), that the pages are scaleable to match user's preferences and that the page design is printer friendly by default.

The solution designed and developed by BOCC provides a single data source reference point that is used to deliver the online version and build the CD-ROM version on the fly (that is then zipped and emailed to the administrator). This, together with a simple system to content manage the web pages, ensures data integrity and ease of updating. The flexibility of the system has meant that Ashact and ETSU have full control over the tool and the means to update it at any time.

Ashact also wrote a Measure and Monitor section providing users with a consolidated step-by-step guide on how to carry out a water balance. Together with links into other ETSU websites, users have an excellent resource.

The completed Internet-facing system is hosted on a BOCC managed server, monitored 24 x 7 by our own systems staff. Dynamic content management, graph creation, administration and server side processing are undertaken using Macromedia ColdFusion server. Pages sent to web browsers are Extensible HyperText Markup Language 1.0(7) and Cascading Style Sheets 2.0(8) compliant.

The website was optimised for Internet search engines by using search engine friendly addresses, using a well designed robots.txt robot exclusion file, optimised page titles, carefully selected keyword and description meta tags. In addition, the site is tagged to the Electronic Government Interoperability Framework (eGIF) standard(9) for meta data (using Dublin Core format(10) ) which potentially allows cross-site searching.

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