Content strategy and training for Bexley Council

In 2016 Bexley London Borough Council was rebuilding its website to make it easier for visitors to find information and get things done.

As an organisation they hadn’t been through a large scale digital transformation and were unfamiliar with the concept of user-centred design.

They needed support to help their organisation understand why a user focussed approach was necessary, the benefits of UX content design and how to implement the associated techniques.

We were well placed to support the council through this organisational change from our work transitioning over 300 government websites to GOV.UK.

Over several months we helped them:

• develop and implement a stakeholder engagement and communications plan

• audit their website content to see how users get to the site and how useful they find the content

• identify their users, document user needs and map user journeys

• create a proposition for what should and should not go on the website

• set up a content production lifecycle in Trello to keep content relevant and up to date

• evaluate the different channels they were using and define a purpose, strategy and KPIs for each

• understand user-centred design by creating and delivering bespoke training courses in user needs and writing for the web

• set up knowledge transfer sessions to share experiences and resources across the organisation

The new website was launched a week ahead of schedule and well within budget. We reduced the number of pages from over 3,000 to under 1,000 with all content written to answer specific user needs as part of validated user journeys.

The council blogged about relaunching bexley.gov.uk and writing user-focused web content.