From chaos to structure: streamlining municipal websites
Residents search for a lot of different of information on municipality websites. From help with pest control, to permits for construction projects, from access to youth care to renewing a passport. But how do you keep such an extensive website manageable? To achieve this, it was essential to re-evaluate all content. And in order to maintain and manage the websites more efficiently, the municipalities made the decision to reduce the page count of their websites from 3,000 and 13,000 pages respectively, down to less than 1000 pages per website. We rewrote the information that remained into clear, readable and concise texts for the residents of Amstelveen and Aalsmeer.
Archiving of surplus pages to leave only relevant and easy-to-find information, written in texts that are easy to read and understandable for everyone.
New, user-friendly municipal websites, where residents can find what they are looking for easily, with better organised information and which comply with laws and regulations.
About Gemeente Amstelveen and Aalsmeer
The Municipality of Amstelveen and the Municipality of Aalsmeer are close to both Amsterdam and Schiphol, with a total of approx. 128,000 inhabitants. The municipality of Amstelveen is an enterprising, green and international city, just small enough to retain a local, small town atmosphere. The municipality of Aalsmeer is known for its flower industry. It is a mix of urban and rural areas, with lots of nature and water around the Ringvaart and the Westeinderplassen. Aalsmeer is attractive for both residents and businesses because of its location. Both municipalities seized the opportunity to improve their digital services when they migrated to a new CMS, Drupal voor Overheden, to give their residents, entrepreneurs and other interested parties user-friendly access to municipal services and information.
From workflow to website
The two municipalities each had digital teams with 5 members and a project manager, with responsibility or their own area of interest, for example the social domain, construction projects or governance and organisation.
They inventoried and classified the information that should be included in the new website. This content had to comply with certain guidelines and principles. They then delegated ownership of all pages to their colleagues, (information owners) from the various departments that were responsible for the factual accuracy and topicality of the content and pages connected to a certain subject or domain.
The project team took responsibility for the shape of these pages. For example, each page had an information owner (content) and form owner (form). The shape owners had the following responsibilities:
Inserting the information into fixed templates and formats.
Writing clear and concise texts.
Coordination and editing of the texts with the information owners.
Placing the texts in the new content management system (CMS).
The project teams had already done a lot of the ground work.
iO's role in this major content migration
The iO team consisted of 4 content specialists and a project manager. We supported the municipalities’ project teams in their tasks as form owners. We translated all the information into clear, user-friendly and understandable texts. In addition, we did final editing on texts that had already been rewritten and placed the texts in the new CMS, 'Drupal voor Overheden'. This also included implementing about 1000 page re-directs: a reference from an old page URL to a new page URL.
"Renewing websites is a big job, especially if you switch to a new CMS and want to inventorise, optimise and migrate all content. iO's content specialists have helped us enormously with this. The websites have massively improved their accessibility and user-friendliness."
Erik Bauer, project manager Gemeente Amstelveen
Streamlined collaboration for unified website content
We spent 6 months critically examining every page. Looking at what could be restructured, made more understandable or shortened? Does the resident have all the information or instructions they need to perform certain actions? By continuously coordinating with each other about writing agreements and the tone of voice , we came together to create a uniform body of pages, with the needs of the website visitor central.
The content optimising phase was shorter than planned, a benefit of our thorough approach and the brilliant cooperation with the project team. All customer requests were picked up quickly, we asked critical questions and delivered answers quickly. As a result, we were able to put a lot of hours into final editing and helping to place all the pages in the CMS.
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Danny van Steijn - Client Director & Content StrategistResult: a much better online experience for the users of the municipality websites
In the end, we worked together to condense the necessary information into a lot fewer pages, and thus improving information management and boosting findability. The users and their most important tasks are central to the new Amstelveen and Aalsmeer websites.
Team members from the municipalities and iO look back on a very successful project. Information on the websites is now much easier to find and filtered by relevance to the resident. Communication between the teams was excellent throughout the process. All efforts were continuously focused on the same goal: to provide the website users with the best possible service.
Do you also want to improve your organisation's online services?
Then contact Danny van Steijn. He will be happy to talk to you to discover your growth opportunities together.