Hertford Town Council
Visit Websitewww.hertford.gov.ukThe Hertford Council website serves as one of the main tools for communication between the council and the town’s residents. Visitors to the website can find information about everything that goes on at local Council level, including information about the Council, the Councillors and the numerous Council Meetings.There is also plenty of information about the various services offered by the Council, the events happening within the town, as well as general town and tourist information.
The Brief
Hertford Council approached us to redesign their existing and very dated website which had been initially designed in-house by one of the councillors. The lack of a content management system meant that updating the website was a time consuming process and could only be carried out by the person who had initially designed it.
Therefore the main priority for the redesign was for the website to be fully manageable via an intuitive content management system. Other priorities included the development of an events calendar to promote the many events put on by the Council, a grave search to help relatives find the burial location of their ancestors, and calendar system to show all Council meetings including finance, planning and town meetings.
How We Responded
We initially worked on ascertaining the priority for each feature of the new website in order to ensure it was positioned correctly within the design. This process enabled us to ensure that despite there being many facets to the website, navigation was kept simple.
We then came up with a design which combined the modern responsive development methods with a more traditional design in keeping more in keeping with the medieval market town that Hertford is.
The content management system provides Hertford Council with the ability to expand the new website with additional pages, as well as control all of the content throughout the website, and was developed with some very specific layout options depending on the style of page required.
For the Grave Search facility, in order to remove the need for any double handling, we used the information from the Councils existing Excel spreadsheets to develop the 'Grave Search' database.
A bespoke events calendar was developed to help promote the various events run by the Council, which was then adapted to work for the Council Meetings that also had an archived area, and can be searched by 'meeting type, year and date'.
As well as the ability to add links, button and images within the main copy of all the individual information pages, the Council also have the ability to upload separate image galleries to any of these pages.