The DXP February 2022 update
The Digital Experience (DXP) team publishes a monthly update on the development of the council’s digital channels, and to let you know our roles and how we can support your work.
What the Digital Experience team does
In the age of dependence on the internet, a trustworthy, reliable, and transparent digital experience is a must-have for Renfrewshire Council.
Started in 2019, the focus of our Digital Experience programme has been to make it easier for our local communities to access and use information and online services. We manage this by ensuring the digital content we create is accessible, user friendly and informative.
You can find out more about the Digital Experience team and our aims here on The Thread.
Progress on the new Renfrewshire.gov.uk
Did you know that the DXP team are building a new Renfrewshire.gov.uk?
After completing the discovery stage alongside our agency partners (Manifesto and FutureGov), we’re now reviewing the agencies’ recommendations and mapping out our actions for 2022. We aim to launch a beta version of the new website around mid-2023. Beta is the first version of the new website and not the final one. We’ll share more detailed information with you over the coming months
The new website will serve as a single point of truth for our users including residents and colleagues and will give users a digital experience with ease and guidance. Read more about the new website and how it fits into the council’s Digital Experience vision.
Update on Renfrewshire.gov.uk content audit
Almost a year ago, the team started analysing the content on Renfrewshire.gov.uk to prepare for the new website. There are 1,800 web pages and around the same number of documents to analyse. You can check some stats from the content audit dashboard.
With this audit, we understand how many people use our information and how they find it online. We also analyse the importance and quality of the information we provide.
When it’s done, our content audit will be an essential source of business intelligence and influence a range of decisions. For example, it’ll help us structure our content based on user needs and life events, rather than council departments. It’ll also help us narrow down and prioritise the publishing of content on the new website to suit what the users find most crucial.
Why we no longer publish PDFs on the council’s websites
To comply with accessibility regulations and ensure people can easily access and use information on all our digital channels like Renfrewshire.gov.uk, the DXP team are moving away from PDF’s.
As a team we understand that moving away from publishing PDFs online will be challenging. It means a fundamental shift in how we communicate with our local communities or colleagues, especially when publishing lengthy reports and legal information is so commonplace.
In order to keep everyone up to speed, we’ve written a blog which explains everything you need to know, including why PDFs have to go and what the more accessible alternatives are.
Our goals for next month
The DXP team is dedicated to continually supporting the COVID-19 and recovery information for the public and colleagues as well as managing business-as-usual requests from across the council’s services.
Over this month we’re planning on tackling a number of items within the wider DXP programme:
- Share our Discovery report with our stakeholders at Digital Board and CMT
- Begin the next phase of the DXP programme and initiate the procurement process
- Continue with our content audit of Renfrewshire.gov.uk
- Finish the first draft of our content and search strategy for the new website
- Develop more guidelines on how to create accessible documents
- Work on the development of a stronger digital proposition for internal comms activities
- Provide advice and support to BAU requests.
