Islington Council
Creating a community focused website for Islington Council
Islington is a diverse and vibrant borough with an exciting story to tell. It had an objective to create a website that tells this story, responds to the needs of its diverse community and engages with them on a level that will improve and deepen their relationship.
To meet Islington's objectives we worked with the council to refresh their online strategy, putting in place a clear and practical programme of change jointly based on user's needs and expert advice.
To find out exactly what the users liked, disliked, and needed from the site, we carried out a number of workshops to crystallise the user's perspective. We spoke with users from across the community and based on this information, we worked with the council to develop a new and fresh online offering. We fashioned a new home page layout, new and intuitive navigational elements and also created new HTML templates for the site.
Following this we created an updated, uncluttered and attractive design style to compliment the new website structure. The previous website was heavily loaded with information. Our challenge was not only to design a site that would be interesting and attractive to users, but also to successfully structure and manage a huge amount of information. The new templates coupled with the new visually rich design created a website that does exactly this.
Having successfully worked with Islington on this project, we are now starting work on developing their intranet – continuing a fulfilling partnership.
Islington Council was voted as one of the best sites in London by SOCITM Better Connected report 2008, a prestigious annual survey of all council websites. The site was awarded an excellent grade for content, in addition to it's already highly regarded transactional status. This influential report also praised the design of the website stating “Nice strong graphic at the top, clear section below with an emphasis on online services - a good design!” The report concludes that the Precedent designed site is overall. “Very good - compelling, in fact, since it gets full marks in many areas.”
