Hutt City Council

Local authorities face a challenging job when it comes to creating and maintaining website content that is clear, consistent, readable, and focused on meeting user needs.

That's because councils deal with everything from animal control to wastewater, from cemeteries to rates. They are full of subject matter experts who know their area of expertise really well, but who don't always understand how to communicate their knowledge in a way non-expert users can understand.

When Hutt City decided to give their website an attractive new look and feel, they also took the opportunity to reorganise and update all their content - but, when that revised content was received by the web team, it became clear that there were contradictions, omissions and variations of style in the new content. Our brief was to review all the content and get it ready for go-live in three weeks' time.

Could we do it? Yes we could! Working with a set of content guidelines, we reviewed every page and made sure that it was internally consistent, that it was consistent with other pages on similar topics, and that it met the requirements of good web writing - short sentences, short paragraphs, most important information at the top of the page, and so forth.

The outcome is a Hutt City website that does a much better job of meeting user needs and organisation goals - and one Webstruxure staff member who knows much more than he ever expected to about Hutt City's public transport options and parking zones.