Planning a new website

You've probably heard that we're busy working on a new shropshire.gov.uk, this is something we've been planning for some time.

Starting a new website from scratch is a massive task so we're breaking it down into distinct stages. We're working our way through the council, service by service, treating each one as a separate website project.

We're in the pen and paper stages of planning a new website

Over the coming months we plan to visit each of these stages in more detail in a series of blog posts to share our  processes, methods and findings. Here's an overview of the steps we go through for each service, in order:

Plan

  1. Choose a service area
  2. Audit and review existing web content
  3. Investigate and research the service (work out customer objectives, business objectives and key tasks)
  4. Planning and workshops (things like creating personas and card sorting)
  5. Create site wireframes and content plans (user experience design, information architecture and page tables)
  6. Testing (on paper, as a result refine wireframes and content plans)

Implement

  1. Design (create final designs in browser)
  2. Test (cross-device and cross-browser)
  3. Implement in CMS (turn the designs into fully working, dynamic pages that can be managed by content editors)
  4. Add content (This should be the simplest part, as we should have written most of it already in the planning stages)
  5. Test (test with real users - observe and record stats)

Maintain

  1. Monitor, analyse and refine