PhillipDade.com

Back in September, I blogged about the new GYBC Website Templates and the progress that is being made with the corporate website redevelopment.

The website is a key channel to support the shift of customer contact from face-to-face and telephone contact to the web. In order to aid in the shift, the journey of our customer, findability and accessibility of the site’s content needs to be improved. It can be seen from the Sitemorse Local Government Website Benchmarking Report that the website is not performing to its optimum capabilities and this is one of the drivers in the sites redevelopment and the continual improvement process.

So far, the project has included infrastructure replacement and installation of the latest release of our corporate CMS - Open Text Live Link Web Content Management Presentation Server.

We are currently working on a total redevelopment of the website’s code base, look and feel. The website is being totally recoded to meet the WCAG 1.0 AA standard and will include some new functionality. The redevelopment has been focused around accessibility, usability and findability - this includes improved site search and navigation.

The new site will have a Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) based layout. The presentation, content and behavioural layers will be seperated to aid in future maintenance and development. This also reduces the impact of bandwidth constraints on the site as the CSS’ are cached locally on the client and not reloaded on each page refresh. All the xHTML code is currently validating successfully using the W3C HTML and CSS validation tools as well as meeting all of the priority 1, 2 and 3 WCAG 1.0 automated checkpoints. The templates have been tested in all of the popular user agents as recorded in our analytics data as well as different operating systems and at varying screen resolutions. Different font sizes can be selected by the customer as well as text-only and varying contrast pages managed through the implementation of dynamic frameworks.

The new site will adopt a fixed width design, text-to-speech functionality and improved navigation based around the Local Government Navigation List (LGNL). Customer satisfaction will also be measured with the implementation of Govmetric. Naming conventions will be implemented that will aid in improving the organic search engine optimisation and search results. The content will be no further than three clicks from the landing page, certain information, as such as licensing, will be contained in more than one section. Customers will be advised of services not provided by the Local Authority and redirected to the website containing this information.

The new site is due to be launched next year with a public beta available prior to the go-live.