Our new approach to content

The website redesign is a few weeks old now, and things are beginning to settle down a bit. The ‘launch’ was far from the end – not only do we have the Corporate site to finish, but also the Zone (for children and young people) and out site for our staff and practitioners.

But it doesn’t even stop once these are live. Right from the start, we knew that the ‘launch’ would only the start. We wanted this to be a base to build on, develop and adapt. Things move so fast in the online world – the iPad is only just over a year old and has already revolutionised the way we interact online; smartphones are accounting for more a larger proportion of out visitors each month; and as for social networks, despite recent reports on stalling growth, Facebook still has 30million users in the UK.

We don’t know what the ‘next big thing’ will be – no-one does (despite what some will claim) – which is why the second most important word during the work was ‘flexibility’ (for info, the first was ‘customer’).

In order to adapt, change and generally make sure we’re ready for whatever comes next, we needed to make sure our content could be used flexibly.

Reduction

Less is more. The first step was to try to reduce what we have. Over the years, we had racked up a fairly massive 9000 pages. This was far too much, and we’ve tried to reduce it down to what is needed. We probably erred on the side of caution in this respect – not wishing to remove anything that we felt might be needed – and it will be an ongoing task refine and adjust over the next months and years.

Amalgamate

Previously, all of the content surrounding a service or a particular piece of information could be spread across a range of pages. There could be a home/introduction page, an application form page, a contact details page, a page of ‘useful’ links, a page of ‘useful’ documents, a page of opening times, a page of fees and cost, and maybe a page of ‘other useful information’. That’s potentially eight pages already!

The more pages, the more clicking around and the harder it is to find what you want.

There are a couple of other problems with this approach.

Firstly, search engine results aren’t particularly useful. If you did a search for ‘School buses’, you’d be presented with eight different results to decide from. Even worst, if you had just searched for ‘Buses’, you might have to work through a further eight pages (about ‘normal’ bus services) before you got down to the area you wanted.

Secondly, it makes it difficult to record accurate visitor figures for these pages. The statistics would be spread out across all of the pages, and prevents us getting a proper grip on the visitors that used the service. This in turn reduces our ability to identify our most popular services and work on improving them – making them quicker to access and easier to use.

Reusable

Separation of content from presentation. Use on plasma screens, transfer to new sites, mobile apps, social media feeds.

Open

‘Open data’ is a hot topic at the moment, but doesn’t need to refer to just numbers and figures. We want to make sure that everything we create can be picked up and used easily and quickly by developers and individuals in ways that make sense to them.

Categorised and tagged

Categorisation of the content is essential to this flexibility. We have so far identified four types of content that might be produced for a service:

• Service delivery information – what a customer needs to know to access a service
• News – promotions, campaigns, awards, latest events, etc.
• Events – open days, workshops, recitals, courses, etc
• Consultations – surveys, questionnaires, and other engagement activities

I’m under no doubt that there will be more (documents and leaflets?), but for now we’re working to these four.

Within these content types, we can categorise individual elements by the service that they relate to, and by tagging specific elements of those services within them, as well as (in some cases) the location that it relates to.

These four different content types are currently held in four different systems, which may or may not be where we want to be long term. But at the moment, this isn’t restricting our ability to take the information stored in these, tag them and use the results.

So what does this result in?

Pulling all of these principles together allows us to do some quite exciting things:

• We can pull news stories and events together to display on our plasma screens in our one stop shops.
• Nuneaton and Bedworth Borough Council can pull out just the events relating to Nuneaton and Bedworth and display them on their website.
• We can create a mobile app that looks at pulling together news and service delivery information for social care.

And, ultimately, we can pull together all of the service delivery information, events, news and consultations relating to a service together onto one page.

…To be continued…