Westminster City Council
Website Strategy and Implementation
Links to work
Brief
Westminster’s website, while comparing well to websites of other local authorities, aspired to be a leader in its class, comparable with the best in the private sector, and one that offered better value to the council and its users. Following a competitive pitch with over 80 agencies, in January 2009 we were appointed to help achieve this goal.
Our insight
Following a comprehensive user-testing process, what quickly became apparent was that the majority of people visiting the website were typically doing so with a specific task in mind. Users wanted to get to the pages relevant to their visit, complete the action at hand and then move on.
What we did
We proposed a radical new solution, reducing homepage content by 60%, removing anything that could not be classified as critical. Furthermore we proposed an innovative approach to accessing site content, based on learnings taken from popular search engines.
The end result was a vastly improved homepage, which clearly served its purpose of directing users to the content they were looking for without distracting them with unrelated information. It was a big and bold decision that completely broke the mould of what a council site ‘should be’, transforming it into something that was more useful and functional for the people who used it.
Since launch the site has benefited from an increase in number of users and a decrease in number of page views, meaning that users are finding content and getting to the service they required faster and more efficiently.
In addition to the quantitative results, the site was recognised in the CorpComms Awards as the best corporate website.
