Creating an award winning website
For a project manager, there must be no better feeling
than seeing a project you've led achieve recognisable results. And
for Steve Mountain of Havant Borough Council, the results have come
quicker than expected.
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Havant Borough Council web
team
L-R Julia Goddard, Steve Mountain, Melanie Powell
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Since September 2002, Steve has led the re-development of Havant
Borough Council's external website www.havant.gov.uk. On the
11th November 2003, the Council received the HantsWeb
award for best Public Sector website in Hampshire, beating
competition from all local authorities, including Portsmouth and
Southampton, NHS sites, Police and the Fire Brigade. The annual
awards, created by Hampshire County Council, attracted over 400
entries. Sites in the Public Sector category were judged by experts
on their ability to provide clear information to help their
'customers' understand the service and how to get the best from
it.
To achieve this level of recognition so quickly is a bonus to
Steve and his team whose main target for their re-development work
was an improved rating in an annual survey called 'Better
Connected' which assesses the content quality and performance of
all local authority websites in the UK. Conducted by the Society of
Information Technology Managers (SOCITM) and published in February
each year, the survey has established a rating system that has
become a valuable target and benchmark for those involved in
developing local authority websites.
In fact, it was Havant Borough Council's drop in the ratings in
the last 'Better Connected' survey that provided tangible evidence
that the Council had serious problems in managing its website.
Recognising the problem
Steve explains what the situation was when he took on the
project last year. "The Council's old site was created and managed
by six people using the FrontPage publishing tool and some very
manual processes. There was no one person with overall
responsibility for developing the website. It had about 1000 pages
but there were no controls in place to monitor whether content was
out-of-date and we believe it was this poor content updating that
contributed significantly to the site being marked down by
SOCITM."
Creating and managing the content was not the only problem, as
Steve explains. "Our IT requirements are 
outsourced to another
organisation and while this is usually a good arrangement, the way
our old website was set-up caused problems as it could take a
number of days to get updated content uploaded to the live site. We
didn't have access to the web server so sometimes pages had to be
further amended if problems with links were found once they were
live. All in all, this was both frustrating and unacceptable."
"The first step forward was recognising we had a problem and
that we had to fix it," says Steve. "Fortunately we had put money
aside in the budgeting process to address these issues so the next
challenge was to work out what needed to be done."
A seminar on Content Management Systems held by the Council's IT
contractor Atkins, really sold Steve and his team on the concept of
Content Management and their need for it to address many of the
issues they currently faced. Next they had to decide which system
would suit their needs best.
No shortage of choice
Steve explains the selection process. "We started with a
'long-list' of 10 possible vendors and then worked with Atkins to
devise a questionnaire, they focused on technical issues and we
focused on content and usability requirements. This was sent out
and then based on the response we got down to a short-list of five.
In some cases it was clear as soon as you opened the envelope that
this was not the right vendor.
"when it came to usability, Immediacy was a long way
ahead"
"In order to assess the remaining five we asked them to present
to us how they would deal with the range of content challenges we
faced. In advance of the presentation, we sent them. A selection of
the typical document types we deal with on a daily basis, including
Word and Excel files that had various formatting and layout issues,
and an extract from an Access database; and asked the vendors to
present how their systems would deal with them.
"From these presentations we got down to two vendors. These were
very closely matched on things like capability, flexibility and
price but the one area they differed on was usability one was a
form based system and the other, Immediacy, provided a WYSIWYG
interface that looked similar to the tools our staff were already
used to using. In fact, when it came to usability, Immediacy was a
long way ahead and we decided it was the best solution to our
needs."
Building momentum
It was now the end of October and all activities so far had been
focused on the product rather than how it would be implemented.
Atkins and Immediacy then worked together on the design and
structure of a new site and prepared a range of site designs for a
workshop session that would be attended by staff and end users of
Council services.
Three broad designs were chosen for the workshop session which
was held in early November 2002. "Those attending were impressed
with Immediacy's understanding of the Council's and citizen's
needs" commented Steve.
A final design was chosen and then a few weeks passed while
Immediacy worked up a full set of templates for the proposed new
site.
In parallel to this, the team at Havant were starting to move
forward with content development. "A big step forward was seconding
someone into a Web Development Officer's role," says Steve. "It was
that person's responsibility to work through a list of the site
content as it stood then, and identify who the likely owner was and
whether it was still valid. By the time those owners had been
confirmed and had a look at their pages, we found that around half
of the content was out-of-date."
At the end of January, Immediacy delivered the final site
templates and the site was installed in the first week of February
ready for the Council to add the required content. The roll-out of
the new content management system coincided with the implementation
of several other new systems, including one for Customer
Relationship Management, and it made sense that all these systems
should sit alongside each other on the same infrastructure. This
demanded some re-configuration by Immediacy to make sure everything
worked as it should. Steve commented "Whenever issues have emerged,
Immediacy has provided a fix. This has given us confidence that
Immediacy is as configurable and extendable as we first
thought."
Getting results
In May 2003, a new server cluster was installed with Immediacy
running on it and the final site went live on the 20th
June.
"Immediacy has transformed how we do the web" says Steve, "we
now have around 60 people involved in keeping our website
up-to-date and a training programme that helps to add more
contributors quickly and easily."
"Immediacy has transformed the way we
do the web"
The transformation has clearly worked, with the site scooping
the HantsWeb award, which has delighted Steve and his team. "I
believe that all the thorough preparation work we did ourselves and
in partnership with Atkins and Immediacy was the key to this
success"
As to the future, Havant Borough Council is now rolling out a
new Intranet, using Immediacy. "This is being developed using all
the experience we gained on our external website" says Steve. "We
are also looking at using Immediacy to set up a number of community
portals which will help serve the online needs of our citizens in
an even more personalised way".
And given the Council's recent Award success, Steve is
rightfully confident about the Council achieving its original goal
- an improved rating in the SOCITM 'Better Connected' survey.