07 Sep 2016
Harrogate Borough Council is a local government authority located in North Yorkshire. It manages a wide range of services for over 160,000 people living in and around Harrogate.
The digital team strived to provide a reliable online presence for the residents of the Harrogate district, but an outdated IT infrastructure and an inefficient CMS system, affected the overall quality of the website. They had to find a way around limited resources, to make improvements.
Sitemorse was the chosen software to help the team establish where on the site needed the most attention.
During the initial site assessment, over 10,000 spelling mistakes were identified as well as a large number of non-compliant PDF files, illegible screen reader collateral, broken links, and other elements that were compromising the council’s service.
This scale of identification, in a matter of hours would never have been possible without automation.
Following the initial assessment, a workshop was provided by Sitemorse, to break down the corrective work into manageable actions.
Key pages such as the entry and exit pages were prioritised, before moving on to the rest of the site.
Clare Cryer, Web and Intranet Support Officer, Harrogate Borough Council, said
“Sitemorse is light years ahead of its competitors. It’s like having my own personal web team on hand, 24 hours a day, but without having to use any physical resources.”
In Summer 2016, Harrogate deployed a new CMS system on Jadu. Instead of migrating an imperfect existing website, the council decided to build a new one, and used Sitemorse to monitor its content from day one – highlighting any issues that required immediate corrective work, before the new site launch.
Since introducing the Sitemorse service at the end of 2014, the team at Harrogate Borough Council have celebrated a climb just short of 400 places in the Sitemorse Local Government INDEX. In the first INDEX which was run with Harrogate Borough Council as clients in Q1 2015 the council scored just 2.8 out of 10 and found themselves being ranked 409th out of a total 429 Local Government organisations. Since then the council have been making improvements and have been ranked 14th in the latest INDEX (Q3 2016) scoring a very respectable 8.0.
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