In general
The Vestfjörður Health Foundation's website is at hvest.is. The website is intended as an information site for clients, prospective employees, the public, the media and current employees, in this order of priority.
The website has not yet been translated into English or Polish.
The website is designed by GÓ and Sigurður Oddsson based on the latter's new look from 2021. Regarding the look, for example color choice and use of images, refer to the report on the new look.
It is based on the WordPress system, which is free, open and flexible, especially when it comes to plug-ins and the introduction of the Gutenberg system. The website takes over from a website that originally dates back to 2003, but underwent changes over time. The last changes were made in 2013 and minor changes in 2018.
The website is accessible on mobile phones.
It should have clear information that covers all of the organization's establishments in an integrated manner.
It should be easy to update. The site should be easy to skim, and photographs and diagrams break up its content.
The routing system (section division) is based on web HSA.is which has activities most similar to ours.
GÓ is the editor, several employees, including key managers, will support updating the content. However, all administrators are responsible for monitoring that the content belonging to them is correct and up-to-date.
Writing style and format
Use simple, clear and neutral language. Our readers are of all ages with different backgrounds and knowledge.
Keep sentences short. It increases readability.
Break up text with pictures, diagrams, subheadings, boxes, bulleted lists, and moderate boldface.
We aim for the website to be machine translatable. Therefore, it is a good practice to read the web in English with Google Translate and see what happens.
Avoid words like "please" and "note". Let's not use smileys, but icons can be used in moderation. Avoid bans; rather, say what is allowed ("Visiting hours are from 17:00-19:00" instead of "Visiting is prohibited after 19:00 and before 17:00")
An exception to the rules for neutral wording is when the author is specifically mentioned and the nature of the content allows for value-laden words or animations in language format. This can be, for example, when an employee is summoned or when thank-you emails are sent.
Text on pages is written timeless or in any case use fixed references to time (refer to months and years instead of referring to "previous" or "yesterday"). Text in news and announcements can be located in time, and although it is generally neater to refer to time with fixed references, it is okay for references to time to be relative to the publication date.
In general, we follow an advertisement about the set of Icelandic writing rules[1].
Telephone numbers are written with a space after the first three digits (450 4500). On the web and in email signatures, all phone numbers are links (tel:+3544504500).
Hours are written in the format 00:00. Periods are joined by a hyphen (en-dash, –), which is longer than a hyphen but shorter than a dash: 17:00, 07:15, and 08:00–17:00.
Name of the organization
The institute is called Westfjords Healthcare Institution. The abbreviation should be used as little as possible, and rather be spoken about the health institution or the institution in text if full name is too long or repetitive. Note the rules for capital and small letters, i.e. Westfjords Healthcare Institution capitalized but the health agency or the institution with a small
The inflection is like this:
- Nominative case, passive case and passive case: Vestfjörður Health Center
- Property loss: Vestfjörður Health Foundation
The abbreviation, where the name does not appear otherwise, is Why?. Avoid HORSE, and do not use at all H-vest, Hvest, HSV or other abbreviations.
The name in other languages
- English: Westfjords Healthcare Institution (not West Fjords, not health care, not institute) (Nor use a possessive comma—neither Westfjords' nor Westfjord's—because although it may be grammatically correct (esp Westfjords') is therefore often omitted in names of this kind, it can be considered that the word is not in the possessive case (cf. e.g. Statistics Iceland) and it will probably be easier to maintain consistency by omitting it). All words are capitalized according to American tradition.
- Polish: Instytucja zdrowia na fjordach zachodnich. Note that in some documents we have accidentally written the first two words as one, Instytucjazdrowia, which is wrong.
- Swedish: Västfjordarnas sjukvårdsinstitut
- Norwegian: Health Vestfjord
- Danish: Vestfjordernes sundhedscenter
News and announcements
News and announcements are published in various places on the web.
- On the front page there is, depending on the case, one main news.
- Below that is the Facebook page and three pieces of news.
- In the main menu you can select "News and announcements", and there is a complete list.
News categories are used to direct news into certain channels. You can select more than one category.
Three types of news and announcements that are specific, if classified:
- Expert Services: news under this category can be seen on the Expert Services page.
- Covid-19: news that comes under this category comes on a special page about Covid-19.
- Main story: One or more stories that are placed very high on the front page. It is assumed that news is only marked as temporary (2-5 days), preferably with a picture. It is recommended that pictures are placed with main news.
News can be set to "expire" in the future ("post expiration" in the plugin "PublishPress Future"). This is used for notifications that some services are closed, changes to services or something that is only relevant for a short time but nobody benefits from being on the web for the future.
News from the older website was included, but many of them were left out, including news from the internal website, news about births, temporary announcements and announcements about vacancies.
Available jobs
The all import plugin is used to retrieve vacancies. The system works so that All Import uses a username and password to access a special URL from Advania that retrieves all available jobs from us.
Each job will be created as a new entry under "Vacancies", and they can be changed there if there are changes that do not enter the job market. It is not fully-tested whether changed records remain changed when data is retrieved.
When a post is dropped from Starfatorgi, it changes to "Drafts" in our system and thus stops being visible on the front end.
Comments
Comments are closed on the entire site.
additions
Map
A plugin called Maps or Google Maps is used (which is a misleading name because it now uses OpenStreetMaps map base now). First you have to create a map in the Maps plugin, but then a shortcode is used to insert the map where it is relevant. This means that when a map is changed and it is displayed in more than one location, it will update everywhere.
Broken links
A plugin is installed to show broken links. It is a good rule to clean them up regularly.
Open Graph
The Open Graph plugin makes sure that links shared on Twitter and Facebook look decent.
Last modified info
A special plugin is installed to show when a page was last modified. The initials of the person logged in are placed in brackets. It's done with advice, it's nice that internally it's clear who has last touched the page, but the author is still not the main issue, so a full name is too much. Abbreviation is set in user settings, best to set the nickname/nickname as the initials and then select below the nickname as the displayed name.
pictures
Photographs make a very good impression on the page and break it up. You can make images small or large, and even put text on top of images.
We do not use images unless we get permission to do so. Images from the web can be used if they are marked so that their use is permitted according to "Creative Commons" license. The Google image search provides an alternative to this.
Main photos are taken by a photographer, but photos from the organization's work taken on a mobile phone are perfectly acceptable if a number of simple conditions are met:
- Persons in the picture have given permission
- The film shows the activity in a fairly positive light
- Unnecessary parts of an image are cut off.
Captions
Four different captions are available in WordPress. Captions, for example, help the blind and visually impaired to use the web. Without intending to make things too complicated, these are our criteria:
- Optional text: description of the image for the blind and visually impaired. If the image is just for decoration, this is left blank
- Title: Very short description
- Caption: What follows the image when it is published with a news item or on a page.
- Description: Description of what is in the picture. May be indifferent to captions.
SiteImprove scanning and accessibility
The Icelandic government has entered into an agreement with the company SiteImprove, which scans the web for various factors and gives it a rating. Scanning is done once a year, but it might be nice to scan the web once on your own account outside of that.
Among the things that give minus points (and are at the discretion of the employees who write on the website) are:
- Broken links
- Number of spelling errors
- Number of sentences with more than 20 words.
- Whether social security numbers are published
Another thing that gives minus points
- Number of pdf, word and excel documents and their availability.
- Accessibility on mobile devices
- Various technical aspects about font size and readability, security (ssl) and much more.
GÓ December 10, 2021
[1] https://www.stjornarradid.is/media/menntamalaraduneyti-media/media/frettatengt2016/auglysing-um-islenskar-ritreglur.pdf
Updated December 11, 2021 (Ed.)