Despite the title, this blog post isn't about a long-lost Robert Ludlum thriller.
It is, rather, a quick run through of a piece of work, as thrilling as any thriller, that's been taking up a lot of our time over the last year, resulting in a refresh of the web offering of a number of council services. This work came about as a result of several of these services moving across to ip&e, the council's trading arm, and, as part of the transition, a need for the webpages to be updated to reflect their new status.
With Mike leading (and responsible for the Umbraco build), Dan on design, Sophie running a series of UX sessions, Mark using it as an opportunity to improve content, and everyone else mopping up what we missed because we inevitably got 'too close' to it (!), we've overhauled:
(*in beta but about to go live)
These have been structured to give the services a more commercial edge, an edge given a massive head start by the services' years of building expertise as local authority teams. In addition, a couple of existing service areas that were part of the original beta project for new.shropshire.gov.uk (Planning and Building Control) were given an overhaul and migrated over to the new.v2 instance of the website, allowing us to polish certain features and allow more of the content to be edited through Umbraco.
Despite a drastically reduced turnaround time for each service, the project ran really well, helped in no small part by the buy-in we got from the services themselves. A big thank you to them for that.
We'd be delighted to hear what you think, so do give us your feedback!
Thanks.