Well… truthfully, we won it months ago but we’ve all been so busy beavering away with our new website project that I forgot to take the time to blog about it!
On 29 June, we received the “Best for Business Licensing” Better Connected websites award for our Temporary Event Notice page. Our page was selected as an example of best practice amongst all of the councils in the country.
Often, the only feedback I get is when something’s broken. When all is quiet I can only hope things are going ok until I get some time to test it with real people. Having an award like this is a great confidence booster in our ability to not just do things well, but do them brilliantly!
What did we do?
The page came to my attention quite early in our adoption of the Government Digital Service (GDS) content guidelines.
It seemed we were using very technical language in this section and explaining things that don’t even matter to the customer. Very much taking the view of “we’re going to tell you what we think, whether or not you want or need to know”.
I had multiple conversations with all of the District and Borough councils to instigate effectively streamlining the information. The ultimate goal is to produce content that can be easily understood by a 9 year old.
A handy tool that I armed myself with was the Hemingway app. It shouldn’t replace having a thorough read of the content yourself, but it’s a handy way to visually show a service just how unfriendly their text can be and the small changes they can make to improve it.
Plain English is a really key focus for our new website and will make the biggest difference to the customer journey so it’s great to hear it’s working. In particular as this is a complicated page that links off to 6 applications that each work slightly differently!
Well done!
BUT
Don’t forget us in Winfrith who want Super Fast Broad band!
Pat
Well done to the D4U team, you deserve it.
I echo the comment above. Well done team.