We were invited to Scotland to visit Perth and Kinross Council a while before the G8 meeting at Gleneagles (see below). Our visit was to help staff prepare for the rewrite of the Council website prior to a major relaunch.
All this before the world’s attention was focused on the area with the arrival of the world leaders. It was an interesting challenge as they had just over six months to complete this major task.
As with many local authorities, the problem was that the content authors had to carry out their day-to-day departmental responsibilities and redoing their web material would be an added extra.
As the staff, in the main, were not professional communicators, this work didn’t always come naturally and they would be working to a finite deadline.
But with the full support of their bosses they rose to the challenge and met their tight deadline. Much bureaucratic wording was eliminated in the process and the result was a more engaging, easy-to-use website.
In 2007 Perth & Kinross Council’s website was ranked as one of the best in Scotland by the Society of Information Technology Management (SOCITM). Leader of the Council, Councillor Ian Miller, commented: “This is excellent recognition of all the hard work our staff have done to make the website as user-friendly as possible.”
Not everyone has the world watching when tackling such projects and we take our hats off to them, and it was a pleasure to have been involved. Check out the Perth and Kinross Council website.