Information on the CCTA Government Information Service conforms to guidelines designed to help easy navigation. The pages include buttons at the top and/or bottom which you can use to move up or across the information hierarchy.

• The CCTA Government Information Service Home Page
• Organisation home pages
• Books and pages
• Finding Government Information
  • Using the Index pages
  • Using the CCTA search system
  • Searching the Web
  • Using the Public Services Directory
• Getting help
• Information about documents
• Giving feedback
• Information for users with disabilities
• Information you can copy onto your computer

The CCTA Government Information Service Home Page

Click on either of these icons at any time to go to the main CCTA Government Information Service Home Page.

Organisation home pages

The Government Pages are divided into pages provided by different organisations - central government departments, agencies, local authorities and other public bodies.

This button is used to get to the home page of organisations which do not yet have a button with their own logo.

Books and pages

Information you can read from your WWW browser

Individual files you access are known as 'pages'. Some may be just a screenful, but others are longer and you have to scroll down to read them.

Many pages form part of a larger 'book' -- our term for collections of pages which can be read sequentially just like the chapters of a paper book or report.

A book which contains more than one page should start with an index. Click this button at any time if you want to return to the start of a book

These buttons allow you to move backwards or forwards within a book. If you jumped to a page in the middle of a book these buttons will allow you to navigate sequentially through the book, they do not retrace the path you have taken - use your browser's back and forward controls for that.

Remember, wherever the standard button bar appears, you can go directly to any higher level in the page hierarchy.

Finding Government Information

Using the Index pages

The CCTA Government Information Service home page allows you to look up information in two indexes: the Organisation Index , which contains titles of all UK government organisations who have pages on the World Wide Web; and the Functional Index , which allows you to look up information by subject or function.

Using the CCTA search system

This button lets you search by keyword for a topic using CCTA's search software. It is easy to use - you just fill in a form on screen. You will find more detailed advice about the Verity system when you use it.

Searching the Web

The following search services are available for search indexes of the entire Web.

Yahoo
Lycos 1
Lycos 2
Lycos 3
WebCrawler

Using the Public Services Directory

Appropriate context sensitive help will be provided following assessment of any areas of difficulty. Suggestions to improve either ease of use or usefulness will be welcome.

Getting help

This button takes you to this help page from any page that has the standard icon bar

More information about the World Wide Web

For more background information about the World Wide Web and the Internet, you might find these pages interesting to visit:

Web FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions)
Yahoo - A Guide to WWW
The Best of WWW Contest
The Web Crawler Top 25

More information about the Government Pages guidelines

The guidelines used to produce the Government Pages will be kept up-to-date as the technology of the Internet develops. The CCTA WWW Guidelines can be accessed by anyone - and we always appreciate feedback.

Information about documents

This button takes you to a page giving more information about the document. This may include an e-mail address for the author, any copyright notices or acknowledgements, details about ordering paper versions and any other information the author wants to give. Some pages will give different addresses for technical feedback and comments about the document's content.

Giving feedback

These buttons takes you to an organisations feedback form or the feedback form for the CCTA Government Information Service.

Information for users with disabilities

[Button]

If this button is at the top of a page, it means that a special version of the page is available suitable for reading with specialist software and equipment.

All Web pages created with CCTA Guidelines include a text description of each graphic button -- so you should be able to use the pages with a text-only browser linked to a speech synthesiser.

If you have difficulty with a particular page, please tell the originator of the page. You should find an e-mail address if you click the "information" button at the top of each page.

This guidance is still under development and will be added when complete. In the meantime the following Web pages may be of interest:

Text-to-speech Web server (form-based)

Information you can copy onto your computer

Copying the book or page you are reading

35k

If you see this button, together with a file size (eg 35 Kbytes) at the top of a page, it means that the whole book can be copied across onto your computer ('downloaded'). This is useful if you want to keep it all or print it out.

Copying other files

Some information is not coded in the code that your browser needs (known as HTML - HyperText Markup Language). Instead, you 'download' (copy onto your computer) the whole file and print it out or read it using different software. You may come across three kinds of files to download.

Files with this symbol are in PDF format, which can be viewed using Adobe Acrobat. The Acrobat reader is provided free by Adobe Systems Inc, and can be downloaded from the Adobe Web site .

PDF format preserves the layout of an original document, including any illustrations. You may be able to set up your browser to automatically launch Acrobat when you download a PDF file. Go to Adobe's own Acrobat help page for advice.

Files with this symbol are in Lotus 123 WK1 format, which can be imported into most popular spreadsheets. They are typically statistical or tabular files

Files with this symbol are in plain ASCII format, which can be imported into any word processor. They are usually simple text files without elaborate formatting.

Note that downloadable files tend to be larger than Web pages and may take some minutes to download. You should normally see the file size (eg, 102k, 24k etc) and experience will show you how fast your Internet link is.

Last revised: 10 January 1996