Local Gov Website Redesign: Some questions for local gov webbers

Website Redesign Questionnaire Checklist

Having been involved with Camden Council’s website redesign, I myself have had some lessons to be learnt like Kevin Brewer from Derby City Council. However, I’ve realized that after talking to several web development teams across local government here in the UK, we all operate or are structured very differently from each other.

Therefore, I think it is useful to have a list of questions as the checklist to your website redesign to ensure it is relevant to you.

I thought I’d start a list of things that are either related or is closely related to website redesign to see what issues stand out the most for you guys.

Please feel free to add to the list as well! 🙂

1) What are the stages/process of your website refresh process?
2) Should you upgrade/change CMS during the website redesign process?
3) To conduct user research internally or externally? And how best to do this in both cases?
4) Revamping the taxonomy. What’s the best way to categorize the site?
5) How to conduct user research internally/on your own?
6) Discussing what needs to be on eForms.
7) Discussing usability, accessibility and branding of local council websites? A guideline maybe?
8) Using google analytics for local council websites. Anyone mastered this? Maybe we can start a guide together and learn from each other on short cuts or tips to identify key content and how to place them on website?
9) Discuss issue of ownership on website content when it comes to services.
10) Discuss possibility of partnerships, ie with police, NHS, DWP etc. Any case studies? What are the challenges and how to overcome?
11) Challenges for Race Online 2012. What is webteam’s and comms role in this. Anyone with a case study?
12) Talk about mobile apps, text services, tv services and any other 3rd party option to deliver services other than the website.
13) How do customer service and webteam work together to deliver an effective and customer-focused website?
14) Investigating the use of ‘search’ on local council website through user research, user testing and focus groups. How to make it better?
15) Providing online registration for local council website (customer access to their own account for council services)
16) Issues with archiving – what do you do?
17) Doing a web content audit. How do you do it?
18) Using internal resources to test local council accessibility – ie blind or deaf colleage to help test screenreader accessibility etc. Do you do this?
19) Due to cuts, a lot of local councils need to review publications. This means revamping online newsletter. How have you dealt with this?

Hope this was useful!

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Cheers,

Liz Azyan