Good content is crucial

It is essential that all content is up to date, consistent and accurate.

There should be a focus on empowerment and responsibility over approvals and editorial control. Good content is informative and engaging, it is in the most appropriate accessible format and is not hidden in attached documents. Content should be well tagged with easy-to-use taxonomies by readers as well as editors and have embargo and review dates. Readers should be able to feedback directly on the content they are reading with further levels of participation available to readers to help improve the content. There should be to-do lists for information that has been identified as missing.

Integration

The capabilities provided by the federated services must be integrated by the existing and future web properties.

While it maybe advantageous to make a big splash by launching a large number of upgrades in one go, this strategy allows for the capabilities to be integrated on a needs basis.

All of the websites and systems owned and run by the Local Authority and other community based websites should be identified and the benefits of integrating each capability with them should be assessed and scored based not just on the benefit to the users of that website but also the benefit to the portfolio of websites as a whole.

Hosting infrastructure

 

The hosting infrastructure of a flexible and dynamic web platform also needs to be flexible and dynamic

A web platform that is intended to be continuously developed and improved requires hosting environments that enable frequent testing and roll-out cycles.  As demand is also likely to increase over time and with the introduction of new features and services, the hosting infrastructure must be able to scale up to meet this demand.

Any suitable hosting infrastructure will include numerous environments dedicated to different roles, including:

• live production
• staff training
• load testing
• acceptance testing
• automated/regression testing
• development

These environments do not require the same level of service, capacity and availability.  Some may require geographically diverse backups.

Service improvement is part of the service

Service improvement (with involvement from the community) must be an integral part of service provision. All transactions should offer citizens the opportunity to use commenting and feedback to suggest service improvements as part of the process. Analytics and metrics should be used as part of an in depth user experience strategy to find and fix points that cause high dropouts. Services need to be provided via as many channels as appropriate and an engaging practical website will bring more people towards the self service end of the spectrum.