Web Development and Design for Ealing Borough Council
The council's previous website suffered from slow download speeds due to a table based layout and build up of HTML tags over the years. Our initial investigations revealed that the HTML alone on the homepage weighed in at over 200Kb.
In Sitemorse Technologies' automated monthly report of UK Government Websites in November 2005, www.ealing.gov.uk came 347th out of 461 Local Borough Councils when rated for accessibility, performance, code quality, function, metadata and download times.
By January 2006, the website had slipped further still, to 418th place, acquiring a zero score for code quality, along the way.
A User-Centered Design Approach to the Ealing Website
In the first instance we drafted a detailed Design Specification document describing how we could recreate the website using CSS within the confines of a content managed solution and existing branding guidelines that could be maintained by an in-house team of editorial staff.
The primary aim was to improve the usefulness of the Ealing Borough Council by adopting a user-centered design approach that included:
From the outset, involving and gathering requirements from the web team and web users, including people known to have specific requirements, such as those with colour blindness
Producing wireframes for layouts of structured content based on requirements and gathering feedback on them from the Web Editorial Team before final coding of templates
Adoption of the Local Government Services List (LGSL) for the basic information architecture to maintain consistency with other Local Councils and familiarity for web users
Identification of the functions that web users most commonly visit websites for such as reporting abandoned vehicles or job vacancy searches
Identify and satisfy business requirements for a successful website such as reducing the number of telelphone calls made to the call centre by providing commonly requested information readily on-line or paying council tax online
Improved page loading speeds with CSS based XHTML
Improved search engine with simple filtering of results for web users
Adoption of a high contrast colour scheme
Use of a consistent navigation system including a dynamic crumbtrail for orientation
Removal of dead links within the website and improved error handling where 404 errors occur to allow users to return to the website following a page not found error
Ongoing iterative improvements to the user interface for the Web Editorial teams when required such as self management of web user accounts by Editorial staff for viewing protected web content
Finally, we assisted in the training and support of the in-house web editorial team at the Council in the use of the Content Management System.
Testing and Post Launch Assessment
During the months following launch, www.ealing.gov.uk was again included in the Sitemorse Local & Central Government Website Reports and immediately climbed 274 places in their results table to 144th of 461 Local Borough Council websites that were tested.
More importantly, in the Executive Summary of their 'See it Right' Accessible Website Audit Report June 2006, The Royal National Institute of the Blind (RNIB) stated that "The Ealing Council website is visually appealing (and) accessibility-wise the web team has done an excellent job." We then interpreted the findings of the RNIB report, directing Editorial staff on how to improve their content to finally attain the accreditation.