Salisbury District Council

Background

Salisbury District Council service the population of Salisbury and south Wiltshire, with 55 councillors and around 665 employees.

The Brief

Salisbury District Council (SDC) were looking for a web design company to assist them in redeveloping the main SDC website. They were looking for help both in assessing and developing the information architecture of the site, and in refreshing its visual identity.

SDC came to Message because they were impressed with not only our expertise in graphic design and information architecture but also our commitment to designing web sites that put accessibility and user-centred design at the centre of the process.

For many years now Message has been at the forefront among web developers in practising and championing accessible, standards-compliant web design.

SDC's key requirements for the redeveloped web site were that it had to be:

• useful
• useable
• accessible
• scaleable

Our Approach

We responded to SDC's brief with a proposal describing clearly what we would do and how we would do it. A key element from Message's point of view was to analyse other district councils' websites to establish best-practice benchmarks specific to their sector.

We also analysed the existing website including how the site performed for key users, looking at tasks such as paying Council tax or a parking fine, or finding information on Housing and benefits, etc.

With insight from this analysis we produced a report for the Council along with our recommendations. Once approved, we redeveloped the IA and navigation systems to simplify and strengthen the experience and apply best practice principles. Our aim was to simplify the navigation on the existing website as well as ensure they had a fresh and modern looking site, brightened up with the use of relevant imagery.

A key part of all of our projects is the creation of wireframes. These enable us to describe visually the functionality and content of a page in a way that is easy for the client to understand and for our developers to be clear what they have to implement.

As web accessibility is clearly a high priority for local authorities, Message included two rounds of usability testing for this project. This was to help ensure the final web site design would be successful and meet the criteria of Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) Level AA or higher (see our PAS78 article for more information on this subject).

After the information architecture phase of the project we created an interactive wireframe of the entire site. This was primarily to ensure the users carrying out the first round of testing would be able to get an accurate reflection of how the information architecture and navigation would work - to ensure they could find what they wanted with ease.

The tests were designed with the key users of the site in mind and the tasks they might want to carry out.

We then produced a report and made recommendations based on these user tests before moving on to the visual design phase of the project.

The second phase of user testing was carried out to ensure that the visual design we developed didn't adversely affect the proven information architecture and navigation.

Production and Implementation

Once the visual design was approved we started work on the production of the XHTML and CSS templates, as well as associated graphics files.

Once all the templates were created, we carried out a three stage testing programme incorporating browser testing, Web Standards compliance and WCAG conformance.

We also provided the Council with thorough written documentation to explain our approach along with the required files and any technical points of note. Files were also thoroughly code-commented to aid integration within their CMS.

Results

As a result of the web site's improved information architecture and logical navigation system that Message designed, site searches have reduced by 80%. This clearly shows that people have been able to find what they were looking for much faster and more easily.