4 months on, an intranet launches

Where an earth did the last 4 months go? I certainly didn't go anywhere, other than to the end of the garden and back! But, here we are in August with summer in full swing. The last time I wrote a blog post was back at the start of April, which means there's 4 months … Continue reading 4 months on, an intranet launches →

Iterating content at speed

As a small unitary authority, we do not have the same issues as teams working to provide clear and concise coronavirus related information to the public at a large scale. The teams at GDS and the NHS have been doing an absolutely amazing job creating content for the nation in a way that continues to … Continue reading Iterating content at speed →

I am a content designer

Last month I had the chance to attend training from Content Design London. Since reading Sarah Richard’s Content Design book, I've been fascinated with the approach taken for content design and wanted to get the training to help us implement more content design processes within the council. Over the course of the training I learnt … Continue reading I am a content designer →

PDF accessibility

With over 1,200 PDFs on our site, we have a lot of work to do to make sure they are all accessible. Over the last few months, we’ve been working hard to reduce the number of documents on our site with accessibility issues. We’ve been doing this in several ways. Stopping PDFs being added in … Continue reading PDF accessibility →

Easy read

A year ago, we launched our easy read landing page with 5 pages ranging from ‘bins and recycling’ to ‘marriages and civil partnerships’. At that time, a new easy read button was in development. This is now live and linked at the top of relevant pages. Relevant pages now have an easy read button at … Continue reading Easy read →

Easy read content now available

What is easy read? Easy read is simplified information for adults with learning disabilities. This includes a huge range of different needs and abilities. GOV.UK encourages local authorities to provide easy read information, particularly for key stages and decisions in someone’s life. The information should be distilled to just the key elements. We have 12 … Continue reading Easy read content now available →

How the beta came to life

We began this blog not quite 2 years ago – in April 2015, to be exact – though the project had been going prior to this. We took a look at some of the work we did in 2015 in our end of year roundup post. We've come a long way in 2016. Here’s a … Continue reading How the beta came to life →

My way or the highway; creating new content for roads

My first experience of creating structure and content for the new website was for the roads section. We had two workshops about this section. One was with Highway Network Management (which has several teams within it) and the other was with Highway Asset Management. For customers, these teams do one overall thing: look after roads. … Continue reading My way or the highway; creating new content for roads →

How to make an enormous website seem simple

Coming from a private sector marketing background, I’ve been involved in the launch of two new websites, one for a shopping centre and one for a niche B2B company in the airline industry. I thought these were decent sized projects, until recently… Redeveloping the council website is a bit like having to do 10 shopping … Continue reading How to make an enormous website seem simple →

Re-developing council tax

It's been about 6 weeks since our first workshop. We've been running a whole bunch of other workshops in that time, and there is a lot of work coming out of each one but we are now getting things together to hand over to our designer to start some basic wireframes. With this progress in mind, I thought it … Continue reading Re-developing council tax →