Your Content

We are always trying to improve the information available on our website both in terms of quality and quantity.

Who writes for your website?

We have around 50 trained people throughout the council using the content management system for our website, which means they are able to add information about their service to relevant areas of the site quickly and accurately.

Everyone who uses the system will have undergone training in order to use the system.

There are many more staff who supply information and we encourage all of them to attend a 'writing for the web' course to ensure quality and consistency of information.

We have a style guide for the website to ensure consistency and to help us make sure our information is accessible and usable and we ask all our content authors to follow the guidance when they are creating web pages.

Training and support

We run two types of training for adding information to the website.

• Content management system - this training enables staff to use the software in order to add information to the website. It also introduces accessibility and usability to them.

• Writing for the web - this encourages staff to create information specifically for the web and not just to reproduce information prepared for other purposes. It also introduces our house style.

The webteam support staff in their work adding information to the website by offering refresher training, telephone, email and face-to-face support as well as advice on creating great web pages.

Readability

We encourage the use of Plain English on our website and wherever possible cut out jargon, where this is not possible we encourage the use of an FAQ page to explain any acronyms or unusual word use.

Content checking

The webteam carry out regular audits of all of the information on the website and assess it on different criteria.

This includes:

• Readability
• Accessibility
• Usability
• Consistency of style
• Currency (information is not out of date).

The team will then work with authors to improve areas of information where needed.