The City of Melbourne asked us to refresh their corporate website. This involved tidying up old content and improving the existing content. It also involved identifying new functionality and establishing a process for ongoing maintenance.
Issues with content quality
Council websites are large, helping diverse audiences with diverse needs. Their content usually comes from a wide range of different authors. This combination can lead to poor content quality.
From our extensive experience with council websites, we knew what to implement at City of Melbourne to make sure a content stays fresh for both council and website users.
Establish page ownership
The project had a short timeframe of three months. Business areas had to review more than 2200 webpages. Then is back to the online communications team to update.
We worked with the business areas to identify any gaps in skills or competencies. At the end of the project, we had identified more than 170 subject matter experts, and 60 approvers across approximately 100 work areas. Many staff didn’t know they even owned a webpage until this project knocked on their door. It wasn’t surprising that the project identified that 25% of pages were out of date or inaccurate.
Communication is the key
The Post Implementation Review survey noted that we did a great job in keeping everyone in the loop. We made sure people knew what was expected and required as part of the project. We have identified quick wins that the client could implement straight away to keep up the momentum on what was a herculean effort by many people.