Primary Services
Information Architecture
UX + Interface Design
SharePoint 2010 Public Facing Website
Custom Development
LGNL Compliance Assured
About the customer
This Local Borough Council serves residents within one of the
largest shire districts in England. It has the largest population
of all the districts in this area though population density is
among the lowest, and the district is characterised by having more
older residents than the national average. The area has a high
proportion of web users, which presents opportunities for more
electronic provision of Council services, a greater number of
electronic transactions and increased contact via the Internet.
With a number of large, sparsely populated and rural areas within
the borough, both the area's size and population distribution mean
it is crucial to provide accessible services, which includes the
Council's website.
Council drivers
The Local Borough Council needed to move away from its existing
platform provider, Immediacy, in order to deliver a more modern
platform. In addition the Council wished to avoid the risk of
updating the platform as no upgrade path was available to the next
version. Importantly the new site needed to ensure compliance with
the Local Government Navigation List (LGNL) - a system to help
users find information on local authority websites in a
standardised, simple, intuitive and clear manner.
One of the key issues facing the Council was how to handle the
website's content and information architecture (IA). The new site
had to ensure that:
- a
significant volume of content (2,000+ pages and
6,000+ assets) was successfully migrated from the old site to the
new;
- all
content had to be mapped in accordance with the Local
Government Navigation List (LGNL);
- the site
had to be delivered to meet a very short deadline for
delivery, as promised in the Council's Annual Plan.
What Brightwire delivered
The Local Borough Council selected Brightwire through a
Microsoft consultancy as its partner to deliver the new website and
content management system, based on SharePoint 2010. We began with
a series of planning sessions to determine the scope and assess the
most appropriate and most usable content structure and IA to be
compliant with the LGNL. We then architected the system to support
metadata tagging as required by the LGNL.
To build the site, we worked with the Council's design agency
and transformed the creatives into SharePoint master pages, layouts
and templates. We then used a combination of Metalogix and our own
tools to move the content, using developed code to place it
correctly in the new site's structure.
The new Council's website benefits from a more usable and
attractive interface which fully complies with the LGNL. This
structure, as set out in the LGNL, provides a better structure of
content and makes it far easier for users to quickly find the
information they need. In addition the site is more responsive and
performs well across multiple devices. With our SharePoint 2010
solution for public sector, public facing websites, the Council
also has a better, more flexible platform to integrate other sites
and Council services.
