PhillipDade.com

On the 16th July, I attended the SOCITM Insights/E-Gov Bulletin Event entitled “Building the Perfect Council Website”.

The day was very interesting and the key note speech by Gerry McGovern gave everyone some excellent ideas to take back and also sparked some controversy. I’m not sure how some of the suggestions would go down within the corporate environment, however, there were some very good points all the same.

The main points that came out of the key note were:

• Don’t keep your customers on your site for any longer then needed to allow them to complete what they came to do - remember the customer is time poor.
• Customers should not need to understand the organisational structure in order to complete a task.
• We take their money and time, the customer will only be more frustrated and angry if they cannot complete the task they want to - promptly.
• Focus on what the customer is trying to do, attempt to complete the tasks your customers undertake and experience the journey for yourself.
• Ensure the navigation is appropriate - not focused around organisational structure.
• Make the top tasks are ‘do-able’ from the homepage, keep these tasks up-to-date and ensure the website is customer centric.
• Remove press releases, policies and strategies - these are non productive, and, who reads them anyway?
• Remove 90% of the content - it’s not maintained, never read and is probably there as a FOI dumping ground. The content should be productive, efficient, relevant and to the point.
• Testing and improving the website should be a continual, relentless process.
• Being with the customer is the essence to managing websites - 80% of web management is focused around observation.
• Stop the political messages (Our leader says…).
• Do not use the website as justification of purpose.
• Remember - great websites are ugly but functional.
• Boredom is the worst reason to change the website.
• Remove Government jargon and other acronyms - revert to plain English - this will assist with search.
• Page titles should be unique - remember people control search and not organisations.
• Use the website as a medium for channel shift away from the contact centre - NI14.
• Personalisation doesn’t work.
• Councils must remember that the “We are not the centre of the universe” - the customer is.

One of the key points that struck a chord with myself was about the removal of irrelevant content. My Councils site, like many others, has been used as a repository for storing “stuff” that is out of date and irrelevant to the customer, but may assist with FOI requests. When in reality, this is rarely the case; it only makes the management of the site more complicated; decreases search functionality, make navigation harder and irates the customer. Instead, the website should be split into three sections, transactions/core information, corporate data and an archive.

The customer should be able to undertake prompt electronic transactions with the Council and then continue with what ever task or activity they wish. Relevant, efficient and productive information and content should be written in plain English, easy to navigate to and find within the search. Finally, the endless store of information and “stuff” that the Council produces (strategies, policies, press releases etc) should be stored within an “archive”; easily accessible by search should a user require such information. However controversial this may be with some, this will assist with channel shift and encourage online interaction with the Authority and, ultimately, improve the customers journey.

The other key point was around personalisation. I feel that personalisation assists the customer in their journey and is an excellent tool, used in the right context. Personalisation works extremely well for Amazon, Ebay, Play and other big online stores. They can suggest items that you may be interested in based around previous purchases and searches.

I am initially looking at personalisation on a smaller scale. There are different elements of personalisation, each of which have different impacts on security, privacy and ultimately, the user. In my opinion, the two key forms of personalisation are:

• Anonymous personalisation - predominately session based - focused around basic information provided by the user and doesn’t require the storage of personally identifiable information.
• Authenticated personalisation - Targetted to individual users and requires users to be registered and authenticated against a database/other system prior to being granted authorisation to priviledged information.

My Council is currently implementing a Web Improvement Project that will enable us to provide a new, more accessible website and a structured framework to further develop upon (more on this later). Some of the changes that my Council will be implementing in the first instance, will be focused around non personally identifiable information, as such as the customers postcode. This will enable the homepage to be customised to where the customer lives and provide information on the day bins are collected, find out who there Councillor is and so on. However, should a user not wish to provide such details, this will not impact on, or restrict their journey. Ultimately, as other systems are integrated with our new website, we will have to implement authenticated personalisation for areas as such as Council Tax and Benefits.

The other key seminar was “The use of Web 2.0 techniques on Council Websites”. This seminar had speakers from Jadu, Redbridge and Devon County Council.

Having met Carl Haggerty, Web Innovations, New Media and Portal Manager from Devon County Council the night before; I had a very good insight into the develop ents that they were undertaking and how they were integrating Web 2.0 techniques into their redeveloped site. The other important factor here for myself was that both Great Yarmouth Borough Council and Devon County Council use the same Web Content Management System. As Devon were only at the development and early implementation stages with their new site, it was nice to have Steve Johnson from Redbridge to discuss their site, achievements and the resulting impacts and savings.

After attending Gerry McGovern’s Key Note and the Web 2.0 Seminar, I already had alot of ‘fodder’ to begin working with. And, to be honest, the rest of the day, and train journey home, was spent digesting the information that had been provided during the morning session.