New website launch

Our new website is now live! It’s been a journey of almost two years from initial workshops and planning, to finally building the site over the last few months. The past six months have borne the brunt of the work, hence the radio silence on the blog! We’ve put a lot of focus on redesigning … Continue reading New website launch →

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 →

Take our homepage navigation survey

We are pleased to have entered the next phase of our website redevelopment and are now testing the structure of our new homepage. We would love to have your feedback – if you have 5 minutes to spare, please help us by taking our homepage navigation survey. Thank you.

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 →

Talking Local Gov websites

I recently had the chance to go to Local Gov Camp in Leeds. Local Gov Camp is an unconference hosted by Local Gov Digital where lots of local government (and otherwise engaged) folks turned up to run sessions on whatever they felt the need to discuss. Sessions ranged from service design, to open source LEGO and much … Continue reading Talking Local Gov websites →

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 →

Our Drupal journey

Five years ago open source software was not on our radar at Bracknell Forest. About eighteen months ago that all changed as we looked for a replacement for our web content management system. We wanted a system that would give us the flexibility to develop and design websites ourselves, whenever we wanted to. We chose to trial … Continue reading Our Drupal journey →

Document growth and cutting back

We use a lot of PDFs on our site (2177 at last count). This isn't always a good thing, as PDFs can be inaccessible, require downloading, don't look great on a mobile device, and are much harder to keep updated (ever opened a document and found it was out of date or had broken links? How annoyed … Continue reading Document growth and cutting back →

3 years and counting

Over the past few months we have done a lot of stock taking on our existing website. This has helped us inform the way we want to move forward with the re-development. It’s also a good way of benchmarking for the future. Our current site is over three years old. In this time, we have gathered a large quantity … Continue reading 3 years and counting →

Persona development

Thinking about who your customers are is a vital part of any website. To help us keep our customers in mind as we plan out user journeys and content, we are developing a series of personas. These personas are used to capture trends in our customer base, as well as edge cases. The ones we … Continue reading Persona development →