Government Office for the South West
The Government Office for the South West (GOSW) in England was redesigning their website, based on the plans laid down by the UK government to increase transparency and increase the availability of services over the internet.
The GOSW offices are split up into many teams addressing topics such as transport, environment, housing and Education. This structure demanded a complex content management system, whereby designated authors within each department would be given the brief of keeping relevant information up-to-date and available on the internet.
An authorisation structure was also needed, as government guidelines needed to be adhered to when creating the web content. This would require a tiered layer of authority, starting at the author's line manager, through the authority of the department charged with publishing the full website - who would also check it for aspects such as accessibility.
The solution
Mounted on a Microsoft© platform, the system was installed with a specialist facility to allow the easy input of web pages from the old systems format to be easily cut-and-pasted into place. The CMS system automatically removed any redundant formatting, dramatically cuting down the amount of time required to complete the web content.
The network wouldn't support a lot of bandwith - so using any remote website would frequently be slow, particularly at peak times - the full website being hosted on a remote server, the system was integrated into the intranet server to cut down on internet traffic, and make the updating process completely isolated from any internet slowdowns or other network problems.
On the server, critical updates could be done instantaneously - a light version of the Content Management Interface was used to allow the administrators easy access to the page content. With no need for the content to be authorised prior to it going live, once the changes have been made, the new text or product information is instantly available to the website users.
GOSW also took advantage of the training days - a series of training days were run, not just on the CMS solution but on best practice for writing for the web.
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