The Supporting Best Practice section of the Early Childhood Australia website offers links to early childhood information on the internet.

All sites from which links have been harvested have been quality assured by Early Childhood Australia using its quality assurance guidelines.

Where sites cover areas other than early childhood, such as university extension programs in the United States, only that part the site which deals with early childhood issues has been assessed.

All efforts have been made to ensure that the information is accurate, up to date and high quality. The material linked to is provided for information only.

Early Childhood Australia's quality assurance approach

• Sites which have Health On The Net Foundation (HONCode) or Tufts University Child and Family WebGuide (Tufts) accreditation are deemed to be quality assured
• Australian Government sites, and some other government sites, are deemed to be quality assured
• Sites which do not meet these requirements are assessed against the following standards and rated as satisfactory or unsatisfactory.

Early Childhood Australia's Quality Assurance Guidelines

These guidelines have been adapted from the Tufts University Child and Family Webguide accreditation guidelines and ResilienceNet

The six principles for evaluation are:

• Relevance
• Authority
• Content
• General Design
• Navigation
• Server Performance and Technical Issues

• Is the site relevant for some part of the intended audience?

• Is the purpose of the site clearly stated?
• Is it clear who sponsors the site?
• Is there information about the site sponsor?
• Is the goal or mission of the sponsoring organisation indicated?
• Are the authors of the content on the site identified?
• Do you believe the authors are knowledgeable about their topic?
• Is there a provision for feedback, through e-mail or a Web-based form?
• Is contact information, including a postal address, provided?

• Is there sufficient content that is useful to warrant inclusion in Supporting Best Practice?
• Is the topic covered sufficiently for its purpose?
• Does the content appear to be accurate?
• Is the content objective? Or, if there is an apparent bias, is it clearly identified?
• Is the content up-to-date?
• Is the text free of grammatical, typographical and spelling errors?
• Do page titles or headings accurately describe what information is presented?
• As far as you can tell, are the links at this site to other sites appropriate?
• As far as you can tell, are the links to other sites kept up to date?
• Can one freely copy or download the content of the site?

• Is the design of the home page and remainder of the site attractive?
• Does the design help or hinder access to the content of the site?
• Is the design consistent across pages?
• Is the content organised in an easy-to-follow way?

• Is there an easy-to-follow menu or table of contents page?
• Is it generally easy to find information on the site?
• Is it easy to move across the pages of the site?
• Is it easy to move back to a previous page, or to the home page?
• Does the site have a search engine?
• Are instructions provided for moving across the site or using interactive search features (such as a search engine)?

When evaluating these criteria, consider that most of these features (such as speed of page loading) are partly dependent on the web server and partly dependent on your own computer, modem, and internet provider.

• Do the pages load quickly?
• Do the graphics load quickly?
• Do other (than graphic) non-text features work appropriately?
• Do nontext features (graphics, sound, video etc.) serve a purpose related to content?
• Is private information (e.g. credit card number) requested on the site?