Warwickshire Website seeks help from county residents
Warwickshire’s Web Team has consulted the public for feedback in the latest stage of the redesign of the county council website.
The team have studied current usage of Warwickshire County Council website, alongside analysis of feedback on how the council should be sorting its services, and discussions around how it plans to deliver even better services online.
The team has posted draft designs on the Website Project blog and are inviting residents to comment and advise on all aspects of it. Examples include whether visitors prefer vertical or horizontal navigation, if they are happy with the general style, or if there’s anything they’d add or remove.
Before switching to the new website in a few months time, residents will also get the chance to play around with a live beta (ie an unpublished version of a webpage design).
Warwickshire County Council webmaster, Paul Inman, is carrying out the redesign which is remarkable insofar as the costs involved have been limited to hundreds of pounds rather than hundreds of thousands or even millions as has been the case in other local authorities.
He urges residents to guide the team on what they would like the website to look like but suggests some of the aims that the county has.
“We think it’s important to keep a very consistent design across on all the pages, allowing people to find forms, contact details and related services extremely easily. We’ve tried to keep pages as clear as possible, adding video content, maps and image galleries only where we think they really help visitors.
“As with the content pages, we’d like the navigation to be easy to use and focus squarely on the requirements of our customers, with visual cues to help people find the service they need.
“We have some ideas for the homepage, but as most of our visitors come via Google results straight to these content pages, we thought it was most important to get these right first. The decisions on these designs will then influence the homepage.”
”Those are our thoughts but we welcome those of our website’s users. They are, after all, the people that we are carrying this work out for.”
The screenshots are available to view at http://www.warwickshire.gov.uk/webproject. Comments can be left on the live blog or emailed to webmaster@warwickshire.gov.uk.