Four more great examples of digital rockstars

11 Dec 2019 | SM update | General

Michelle Hay
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It’s always inspiring to see our customers be true digital rockstars and significantly improve the websites they are responsible for.  Often these digital rockstars don’t necessarily demonstrate all the traits you’d expect – they are persistent, process-oriented, determined and usually very modest! We recently covered four great web management approaches from clients, and here’s four more examples of digital rockstars who are using Sitemorse and demonstrating some excellent practices. 

Read below for some takeaways that all digital managers and website teams can learn from. 

Cleaning up the archive before establishing governance for new content

If you’ve had little or no governance on your website you may find yourself with a large, sprawling site – you may even be suffering from digital bloat! This is often the case with older material where there isn’t a pressing need to review it and instead it just gets left. As this collection of content grows and grows it can cause issues with findability, compliance and even performance, meaning web management becomes that much harder. It can also cause issues if you want to upgrade a site. 

If you are determined to establish digital governance, particularly for new content, it can be necessary to spend time reviewing and archiving your old content and then putting processes in place to regularly retire out of date or expired pages and files.

Richmondshire District Council LogoRichmondshire District Council serves a population of just under 54,000 people. The team’s main digital challenge was dealing with a significant archive of material much of which was out of date or had issues such as broken links. This content undermined the team’s aim to establish digital governance, but also had the potential to provide inaccurate information to citizens. 

As part of a clean-up exercise for a new website, the team were able to remove almost 2,000 pages out of 2,700 and then establish robust digital governance to prevent a repeat build-up.  To make this happen, the team use Sitemorse automation to identify and fix issues as they come up, and to ensure new content meets expected publishing standards.

Integrating automation into your key processes

If you want to achieve digital compliance and improvement, then automation needs to be part of the mix. It is simply not possible for humans to review the volume of content with the level of detail required to cover elements such as SEO, internal brand compliance and WCAG 2.1 compliance. Manual testing and reviews are still an important part of managing a website and its content, but integrating automation into your key content and website processes will help support your team, drive efficiency and ultimately make for a better visitor experience.

SynerGIS logoSynerGIS offers fixed rate investment bonds over 1 or 2 years for savers and in a fiercely competitive financial services market, the customer digital experience is a real differentiator. To try and drive the best customer experience possible, the digital team at SynerGIS have integrated automation into the way they manage digital channels on a day to day basis. This includes regular monitoring to ensure that there are no performance, compliance or content issues, but also using Sitemorse as a core part of the management reporting of digital performance to senior stakeholders. It also covers the way they review client experiences. 

The SynerGIS CEO comments “Sitemorse performs an essential part of our client process reviews and ensures consistency across our front and back end procedures”

Establishing guidelines and using automation to support governance across a publishing community

One of the real challenges for website teams is trying to manage a wider publishing community who are usually authoring or managing content beyond their normal responsibilities, and who have little or no training. They are also usually very busy. How do you get this group to take responsibility for their content and meet required publishing standards? “Herding cats” is a phrase that may come to mind!

To maintain good content two components are usually essential; firstly, having clear publishing guidelines so everyone is clear what are the expectations around published content, and secondly having processes to make sure content quality is maintained.  For the latter, automated assessment of content can really come into its own. 

At the University of Sunderland the website plays an important role in attracting new students.University of Sunderland Logo There are a wide number of different content contributors from right across the University, in an extensive site with multiple types of content. Because the central web team is small, they need to rely on this group to make sure content is relevant, up to date, accurate, well-written, sensibly structured and fully compliant. Clear governance and a commitment from contributors are critical.

To make this happen the team have established clear publishing guidelines and a style guide, but also introduced Sitemorse automation to ensure content is regularly tested for compliance with the publishing guidelines. Owners are automatically notified when there is an issue to be fixed. This ongoing governance process also ensures that responsibility for content is fresh in the mind of contributors and owners, but also that they are not overloaded with additional work on top of their normal “day job”.

Using benchmarking to both inform and focus digital improvement

If you want to drive digital improvement you need to be able to know where you are, where you want to be and what you need to do to get there. This can only really be done through measurement. The right measures identify what you need to do but also gives teams focus and the motivation to make progress; teams are happier to keep on moving if they know they’ve already moved the needle.

We’ve been independently benchmarking websites through our INDEX service for more than a decade. The benchmarking not only provides scores on different criteria, but also league tables to rank you against other similar websites.  

Bracknell Forest Council LogoAt Bracknell Forest Council the digital team used the INDEX to drive both focus and momentum in their digital improvement efforts.  Using measurement and automation they were able to inform some of the actions they needed to carry out in order to achieve fantastic results – appearing second in the Sitemorse INDEX for local government for three consecutive quarters and also scoring 9.8 for accessibility. These efforts not only coincided with new compliance requirements for local government but also a wider initiative to make everything accessible for the 120,000 citizens who live within the council area.  The team have also instigated an impressive range of additional testing, content management processes and more. 

Perhaps what make the team at Bracknell Forest Council true digital rockstars is their drive. For example, Digital Services Manager, Colin Stenning is now determined to get to number one in the INDEX and make it the best local council website in the country for accessibility and more.

Want more insights?

Managing digital channels can be challenging, particularly on limited resources. Taking robust approaches to governance, measurement and stakeholder management are key. Learning from others can provide real value and we hope you’ve found the examples in this article useful. If you’d like more insights, then check out all our client case studies