How to build a content governance framework for an Australian government website
A content governance framework gives your organisation the structure to make consistent decisions about what goes on your website, who can make those decisions, and when content gets reviewed or removed. Without one, content accumulates. Standards drift. The people responsible for approvals change, and no one agrees on what they were approving anyway.
I built content governance frameworks as part of the whole-of-government digital consolidation that reduced ACT Government's web presence to a central managed, governed digital product. Most frameworks I reviewed before starting didn't fail because the standards were wrong. They failed because nobody had clear accountability for enforcing them.
This is a six-step guide to building one that works.
Before you start: what you will need
You need three things before you write a single policy:
A current web content inventory, or the ability to do a basic crawl
A sponsor at SES or executive level
At least two to three hours with the people who currently own content decisions
Without executive sponsorship, a governance framework is just a document. It needs someone with authority to say "this is how we decide" and to back that up when the first stakeholder pushes back.
Step 1: Audit your current governance state
Before writing policy, understand what informal governance already exists.
Ask: who currently decides what goes on the website? Who approves new pages? Who owns existing content? When was it last reviewed? You will almost certainly find the answers are: "whoever asks loudest," "the comms team, sometimes," "unclear," and "never."
Document what you find. A one-page map of current decision rights, even messy and approximate, is more useful than starting from scratch on ideal-state theory. You need to know what you are replacing before you can replace it.
Step 2: Define what your framework needs to govern
Content governance is not about controlling every word. It is about making consistent decisions on five things:
What content belongs on your website (scope)
Who can request, approve, and publish content (roles)
What standards content must meet before it goes live (quality gates)
How long content stays live before it is reviewed (lifecycle)
What happens when content no longer serves users (retirement)
Start with scope. If your website has content that does not support a clear user task or a clear agency obligation, governance is the mechanism to remove it. In my ACT Government work, most of the content reduction came from applying one consistent scope question: does this content help someone do something, or does it explain what the agency does? Most of what we removed failed the first test.
Step 3: Assign roles and decision rights
A governance framework only works when people know who is responsible for what.
Many frameworks describe what good content looks like, but stop short of saying who is accountable for making that happen. That is where confusion starts. Content becomes outdated, approvals slow down, and no one is quite sure who can make a decision.
Your framework should clearly define the key roles involved in content governance, including:
Content owner: the person in each business area accountable for keeping content accurate and up to date. This is a business responsibility, not just a communications task.
Content designer: the person responsible for shaping content so it is useful, clear, and focused on user need. This may include page structures, labels, templates, and patterns for common content types.
Content publisher: the person or team with publishing access, including any required approval steps before content goes live.
Content reviewer: the person or team who checks content for quality, consistency, accessibility, and alignment with standards.
Decision authority: the person or group who can approve major changes, such as new content types, significant restructures, or exceptions to agreed standards.
For each content area, make accountability explicit. In practice, that often means identifying a primary decision-maker and a clear delegate, even when the work is shared. Avoid broad statements like “everyone is responsible”. They usually create ambiguity, and ambiguity slows everything down.
Step 4: Set standards and link them to existing obligations
Australian government content is already subject to legal and policy requirements. Your governance framework should make these explicit, not treat them as optional extras.
Reference these directly:
The Australian Government Style Manual: the authoritative source for plain language, spelling, and formatting
WCAG 2.2: accessibility standards that are legally required under the Disability Discrimination Act 1992
Your agency's specific obligations around sensitivity classifications, records management, and FOI readiness
Do not write new standards from scratch. Link to the Style Manual, link to WCAG, and define what "meeting the standard" means in your specific content context. The standards already exist. Your governance framework is the mechanism that makes them apply.
Step 5: Build the review and retirement cycle
Content does not maintain itself. Without a structured review cycle, accurate content from two years ago becomes a compliance risk today, and nobody notices until a user calls the help desk.
Define:
A default review period for each content type (policy pages every 12 months; campaign content at end of campaign; service pages triggered by service changes)
Who triggers the review: content owner, digital team, or an automated reminder
What happens when content fails a review: update, archive, or retire
Build this into existing processes, not as an additional task. If your agency already has an annual business planning cycle, content review should sit inside it. If it sits outside every existing process, it will not happen.
Step 6: Get executive buy-in and embed the framework
A governance framework does not become operational until it is endorsed by someone with authority and embedded in the processes people already follow.
Practical steps:
Get SES sign-off on the framework document
Add content standards as criteria in your existing clearance or approvals process
Include the framework in onboarding for new staff with web publishing access
Schedule a six-month review to assess how the framework is being applied in practice
The common pitfall to avoid: a framework that is written, endorsed, and then filed. Governance is not a document. It is a practice. The document is the record of the agreements, not the thing itself.
What good looks like when you are done
A working content governance framework means you can answer "who owns this content?" for every page on your website. New content requests go through a documented process. Content is reviewed on a schedule and retired when it no longer serves users. Plain language and accessibility are checked, not assumed.
The real test: if a minister's office, a journalist, or an auditor asks why a specific piece of content is on your website, you can answer them. If you cannot answer that question today, you do not have governance. You have publishing.
Featured image photo by Wahyu Pribadi on Unsplash