With the launch of the City of Edinburgh Council’s new website fast approaching, work is progressing well in all areas to have it ready for September.

Over the last few the months, the majority of work to deliver the website has been completed on time within budget. This is not only due to strong project governance but growing support of the necessary culture change and buy in at all levels from stakeholders to realise the project’s success.

Customer Research

Janet Johnston, Customer Experience Lead, developed and led a 3 month consultation process that finished in March with the publication of the Customer Research Report, outlining the research methodology and detailed the findings.

Customers were recruited door-to-door in pre-selected postcodes in Edinburgh in proportion to the ‘Mosaic profile’ of the City of Edinburgh (the city’s socio-economic classification of consumers) to ensure a fair representation of participants were consulted.

Participants who agreed to take part were invited to either a focus group or one-to-one interview. The general public sample involved 9 focus groups including 70 people and 47 one-to-one interviews. These were supplemented by interviews with special interest audiences which included representatives from:
• Older people
• Parent Councils
• Community Councils
• Health and social care service users
• High school pupils
• Community education users
• The Edinburgh Equalities Networks

The business sample involved 17 one-to-one interviews and was developed with the assistance of contacts at the Edinburgh Chamber of Commerce and the regional branch of the Federation of Small Businesses. 10 respondents from organisations supporting businesses and 7 small businesses in Edinburgh took part in total. A survey of Councillors was also carried out to gain insight into which features would be most useful to citizens on the website.

Feedback on the website wireframes, information architecture and moodboards were sought with a focus on gathering qualitative information rather than quantitative. This individual information was input into the analysis and trends in the feedback were sought to draw up conclusions.

Our customer experience approach has been recognised as an example of best practice by Consumer Focus Scotland who had invited submissions for ‘Consumer engagement in decision making about local services’. As a result, the team has been invited to take part in activities to discuss sharing best practice more widely across public service providers in Scotland. The Web Services Project will also be featured in a publication exploring best practice in consumer engagement.

Design and Build

The findings of the customer experience research were then fed into the design process during April with the final designs approved in May

Edinburgh’s web services supplier Jadu has delivered the new content management system (CMS) and designed a site that Council staff are now populating with content.

Training, Population and Testing

During May and June, over 200 staff identified as publishers for web content (including existing and new publishers) were trained on the fundamentals of a maintaining a good website - how to write for the web and create customer focussed content. The half day sessions explored:
• How to plan, prepare and create content in a task-based manner
• Write effectively and concisely following ‘Plain English’ guidelines
• Adhere to accessibility standards
• New policies on how to use images and create downloads.

These sessions were promptly followed in July with further half day training on how to use the Jadu CMS. Progress on re-developing content for the website, following new, robust governance and workflow procedures are going well, as well as the task of populating the new website.

Testing of the website is taking place over three weeks in August with staff and external volunteers and will include user functional testing, security testing, usability and accessibility testing.