Cheshire councils smile at higher website rankings

Background

Chester City Council and Crewe & Nantwich Borough Council entered into a formal Joint ICT Partnership arrangement around five years ago with the intention of achieving a consistency of approach and fostering joint working between the two authorities. The potential for cost savings where both were using or planning to use the same systems was also a major factor in this arrangement.

In early 2003 the authorities decided to assess their website investments and recognised the potential to improve their online services. This decision was driven by the need to meet e-government targets and the requirements of the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 but also to improve the quality and quantity of online information available about the services being provided.

The solution

The councils recognised the need to deploy content management technology to enable more people to manage content and to create more user friendly sites. They needed a solid content management platform from which they could base all future website developments. The solution needed to be cost effective to provide value to local taxpayers and easy to use to ensure high end user adoption rates. The councils also required a content management system that could scale effectively to serve their interests in both the short and long terms.

Immediacy CMS was purchased by the partnership in 2003 following an extensive assessment period which saw four leading content management systems being considered and tested in detail over a period of several months by a team of officers from both councils.

Immediacy was chosen because it outperformed its rivals in terms of functionality and ease of use. The software’s intuitive look and feel appealed to the councils as it meant they could roll the solution out to both technical and non-technical users. In addition the councils agreed that the Immediacy .NET platform would endure well over time thus maximizing the return on their investments. Both sides agreed that it was the best possible option to strengthen the partnership between the two authorities.

The councils also purchased Immediacy’s premium Formbuilder plug-in which allows non-technical website administrators to easily build data input forms. Forms can be configured to automatically generate an email response or log the input into a database for later downloading or processing. The plug-in was chosen to help the councils increase the efficiency and speed with which information gathering forms were created and posted on the websites.

Results

The new Immediacy CMS websites were launched in October 2004 – since that time both the Chester and Crewe & Nantwich sites have achieved consistently good user feedback and both continue to rank highly in the monthly league tables for local authority websites (Nos. 73 and 56 respectively in December 2006). The Chester website is fully transactional whilst Crewe and Nantwich are working towards this.

“Support for the product has been excellent from all levels of the company – our web programmers have reported very prompt and first class service from the Immediacy support team; and refreshingly also from senior staff within the company whose usual role probably does not include getting directly involved in systems support. The solution helped us meet DDA and e-government deadlines and users have praised us on how easy it is to find the information they need on the site,” said Chris Moulton, web manager, Crewe and Nantwich Borough Council.

Immediacy CMS has now been installed at the Cheshire councils for over three years and both remain committed to using the content management system in the long term.

The councils have recently upgraded to Immediacy CMS 5.2 and have found the accessibility checker in the latest version to be an extremely useful tool and are expecting it to be of enormous benefit in enabling then to fully achieve and maintain the Government’s AA accessibility target. Their websites are due to be relaunched using version 5.2 technology on April 23

Source:

Public Sector Executive - March/April 2007

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