Reflecting back on 2018

A new year is always a time of reflection for me. Especially in that week between Christmas and the new year. Although I had that time off of work this year, that didn't stop me thinking about the year just gone. And when I got back to work this week, I was eager to look … Continue reading Reflecting back on 2018 →

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 →

Home sweet home? – a look at homepage usage

Last week Brighton published a great blog post about their homepage, and how really, Google is their homepage. This prompted me to take a look at our homepage to see how it performs in relation to the rest of our website. What we found out was pretty interesting stuff (if you like this kind of thing anyway!) Looking … Continue reading Home sweet home? – a look at homepage usage →

Wireframe User testing

Last week we held a user testing session on our initial website wireframes. With 10 participants at the session, we were able to test the wireframes across desktops, tablets and mobiles, giving us an insight into how the website would perform across all devices. The participants were recruited through our Open Learning Centre, and as … Continue reading Wireframe User testing →

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don't look great on a mobile device, and are much harder to keep updated (ever opened a document and found it was out of date or had broken links?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 →

Running workshops

We have now held our first three workshops (council tax, births and jobs). The first two workshops were test runs. The teams knew they were having the process tested out on them, which made it a little less nerve-wracking to stand in front of them and ask them lots of questions about their service. Hopefully some of those … Continue reading Running workshops →

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 →