In order to reach this aim we have implemented a set of website standards which those creating content are asked to abide by. This ensures that content across the site has a consistent style and is easy to read.
We are also constantly striving to improve the accessibility of the website.
Creating a consistent website
Our website has been developed with the needs of the visitor in mind and we seek to make improvements to the look and feel and the site structure through gathering feedback and carrying out user testing.
The design and structure of our website has been put together to help the visitor find the information they need quickly and easily without having to worry about the council's departments or a variety of different looking pages.
Our content
Our departments and service areas are responsible for providing accurate information, and keeping it up-to-date.
The digital communications team support staff in their work by offering training, telephone, email and face-to-face support, as well as advice on creating great web pages.
We improve pages through understanding visitor feedback, statistics, good online practice and a range of other tools.
The digital communications team is responsible for editing and adding the content to ensure it meets our house style, is consistent, and meets web accessibility and usability standards. They determine how the website should be structured, and how individual pages are laid out.
Search engine optimisation (SEO)
We need to make sure our information can be found easily by members of the public using search engines such as Google or Bing.
Information supplied to the digital communications team will often need editing for this purpose before it's published online.
For further information, moz.com includes a good beginner's guide to SEO.
Readability
We encourage the use of plain English on our website and wherever possible cut out jargon.
In some cases we also use the 'Flesch Reading Ease' system to measure how easy the information on our website is to understand.
This system analyses web pages and calculates a score of between 1 and 100 - the nearer to 100 the score, the easier the information is to understand.
We aim for all our content to score 50 or above on the scale, along with fitting with our house style.
Content audits
The digital communications team carry out regular audits of the information on the website and assess it on different criteria.
This includes:
- readability
- accessibility
- usability
- consistency with house style
- currency
The team will then work with authors to improve areas of information where needed.
Document, images and multimedia content
Most of the documents on our website are available in Portable Document Format (PDF) or CSV files.
We also ensure that where images or other multimedia content are used on our site they are added in an accessible and usable way.
You can find out more about the accessibility standards we work towards.
If you have any questions about how information is added to our website or the standards we follow please contact us.