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According to the BSI, despite spending millions each year on website services, UK businesses and Government are still failing to make the most of their online customers.

To address this, the BSI in conjunction with large corporations such as Shell and Unilever, have drawn a best practice guide, dubbed the Publicly Available Specification (PAS) 124, aimed at helping companies define and implement website standards

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when designing and upgrading sites.

"Our experience shows that businesses are actually reducing the impact and value of their web presence, despite the millions invested each year, because they are not implementing website standards successfully," says Simon Lande, CEO of Magus, a web compliance company that collaborated with the BSI on the new guidelines.

"This is a major step forward for the web industry. BSI has brought together a wide range of expertise in the field of website standards to develop a robust, practical framework that will yield great benefits for the industry," says Mike Low, director of the BSI.

The announcement comes as a new report from the Committee of Public Accounts shows a quarter of Government bodies cannot show how much their sites cost, with 16% unaware of how those sites are being used by the public.