www.birmingham.gov.uk Alpha project - Marketing campaigns on the home page

simon gray — 2013-02-20, 10:12:31 - 814 words

Back in late September 2012, as part of my work at Birmingham City Council, I instigated and led on a programme of incremental improvements to the council's website, blogging about the ideas and progress along the way, taking inspiration from Shropshire Council's Project WIP and the Government Digital Service work on www.gov.uk. The site on which I blogged has been taken down now, but I thought it worth reposting the more broad-reaching content from it here.

As well as the issue of images on the home page, another issue which has been the subject of a fair amount of internal discussion is the one of marketing campaigns on the home page.

Our current site – like almost every other council website in the country – has an area on the home page devoted marketing campaigns, such as where we promote our commercial property portfolio, advice about staying warm in winter, or information about public question time at full council meetings.

It’s part of the received wisdom of how a council website is constructed that the council has messages it needs to communicate to the public, and the place for it to communicate those messages is via the home page, because the home [...]

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www.birmingham.gov.uk Alpha project - Images of Birmingham on the home page

simon gray — 2013-02-13, 17:43:08 - 1317 words

Back in late September 2012, as part of my work at Birmingham City Council, I instigated and led on a programme of incremental improvements to the council's website, blogging about the ideas and progress along the way, taking inspiration from Shropshire Council's Project WIP and the Government Digital Service work on www.gov.uk. The site on which I blogged has been taken down now, but I thought it worth reposting the more broad-reaching content from it here.

One of the issues which has caused a fair amount of discussion amongst colleagues internally is the matter of images of Birmingham on the home page.

There’s a strong view that as well as being a gateway to the services the website and the council as a whole offers, the home page should be used to market Birmingham the city, particularly by means of having pictures of Birmingham on the home page.

We’re not automatically opposed to this idea on principle – but we are indeed unsure about it as a direction to go in, partly because we want to ensure the home page is as focussed and uncluttered as possible, and partly because we don’t think people come to the council [...]

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www.birmingham.gov.uk Alpha project - Project product map

simon gray — 2012-12-20, 15:54:26 - 174 words

Back in late September 2012, as part of my work at Birmingham City Council, I instigated and led on a programme of incremental improvements to the council's website, blogging about the ideas and progress along the way, taking inspiration from Shropshire Council's Project WIP and the Government Digital Service work on www.gov.uk. The site on which I blogged has been taken down now, but I thought it worth reposting the more broad-reaching content from it here.

As part of the iterative and agile process we’ll be working under, I’ve put together the first draft of our project map, identifying the various ‘products’ which will need to be developed as we go along:

As the project progresses we’ll be colouring those red boxes yellow and green, and adding more boxes along the trees, and of course adding new boxes and branches as new products are identified.

#localgovdigital #localgov

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www.birmingham.gov.uk Alpha project - Developing the sub-projects

simon gray — 2012-12-03, 18:05:21 - 575 words

Back in late September 2012, as part of my work at Birmingham City Council, I instigated and led on a programme of incremental improvements to the council's website, blogging about the ideas and progress along the way, taking inspiration from Shropshire Council's Project WIP and the Government Digital Service work on www.gov.uk. The site on which I blogged has been taken down now, but I thought it worth reposting the more broad-reaching content from it here.

In order to make this whole project manageable, we need to split it up into a number of (initially five) sub-projects, from which our agile / Scrum series of products will emerge.

The sub-projects can be broadly grouped into three categories – content strategy, infrastructure, and governance. So far we have these:

Information Architecture

This is how people will navigate through the site – not just by the menu structure, but also A-Z, related links, and search. It will be looking at how content fits into the six top levels, identifying where the possible points for confusion lay, and mitigating that possible confusion.

Content

Relating to Information Architecture, we need to perform a content audit of the existing site and determine what pages we [...]

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www.birmingham.gov.uk Alpha project - Project outline, scope, goals, and outcomes

simon gray — 2012-09-14, 15:43:58 - 2170 words

Back in late September 2012, as part of my work at Birmingham City Council, I instigated and led on a programme of incremental improvements to the council's website, blogging about the ideas and progress along the way, taking inspiration from Shropshire Council's Project WIP and the Government Digital Service work on www.gov.uk. The site on which I blogged has been taken down now, but I thought it worth reposting the more broad-reaching content from it here. This is the first post, which outlined what the project was actually about:

The Alpha project, inspired by the same methodology the central Government Digital Service has used as it redevelops https://www.gov.uk/ and Shropshire council’s Project WIP (http://shropshire.gov.uk/projectwip/), was conceived in March / April 2012 as a separate website on which we can develop and trial innovative developments in how we deliver services on birmingham.gov.uk in the future. Permission to proceed with the project was granted in early May, with the purchase order for the web hosting necessary for the work being sent to Service Birmingham on 7 June, with Service Birmingham delivering the development environment hosting on 4 July. Much of the background and preparatory work has been carried out [...]

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