Our content design principles

Our principles make sure our online services are easy to use, intuitive and focused on customer needs.

• We start with user needs.
• Make sure the most important user needs, tasks and content are prominent.
• Understand what users are doing from good practice, usability testing, analytics, and user behaviour.
• Do the hard work to make the user experience simple.
• Iterate, then iterate again – ensure that you user test and check it meets customer needs and behaviours.
• Follow web standards to ensure accessibility for all.
• Content must be relevant and up-to-date.
• Put information where people are looking for it – do not assume that content should be delivered in the same manner online as offline, consider the channel choice and delivery method.
• Be consistent, not uniform.
• Make things open and reusable – share and look for opportunities to reuse good things that others
  have delivered.
• Make sure all core services are part of the www.somerset.gov.uk domain

Specific audiences

Some people understand complex specialist language, but do not want to read it if it can be written more simply. We understand that our writing will be more effective if we understand who we are writing for. We try to make our writing as easy to read as possible, so it is accessible to everyone.

What we publish

We try to publish what the user needs to know. People read differently on the web than they do on paper. We try to be specific, informative and make our content clear and to the point. We use short sentences where we can with subheadings, sections and simple vocabulary. This helps people to find what they need quickly.

Our content types

We divide website content like this:

• Information focused content – Content that includes easy to understand advice, guidance and information.
• Task focused content – Content that includes a transaction with clear guidance on how to complete the task,
• Data content – Structured information that consists of numbers, places, times dates and descriptions. We usually call these ‘records’ and obtain them from business systems.
• Documents – These explain policy and process. The separation of documents is convenient but, they need to meet the same objectives as our curated content.

Where we get our information

Information is sent to us from:

• Our services – Usually if existing information needs updating or if a new page needs creating for a new service.
• Customer feedback – Sent in by our users from the feedback form. This tells us what is good or bad about a page and where improvements could be made.
• User testing – We complete user testing before and after there has been a large change in content or a new online service has been put in place.

Where the information is written and published elsewhere, we try to signpost to that information instead of recreating it.

For example, Covid-19 information on the NHS website and GOV.UK.

Where we put things – organising, grouping and structuring

There is no minimum or maximum page length for our website. We do keep in mind that:

• The quicker we get to the point, the greater the chance your target audience will see the information you want them to.
• It is important to write well and keep our content as focused as possible.
• We try to start with the most important information at the top.
• We break up text with descriptive sub-headings. The text should still make sense with the sub-headings removed.

We try not to use:

• Questions
• Technical terms unless we have explained them
• Frequently asked questions (FAQs) – If we write content by starting with user needs, we should not need to use Frequently asked questions.

Emergency and important site messages

When and why we add banners to the site

We sometimes need to use a site wide banner to give out emergency or important information and signpost users to where they can read more detail. A banner is used for messages that will affect most site users or when there is a problem with or a change to a service that affects a large number of the public. Where an issue only affects a small specific audience, a banner can just be applied to the specific site section. We can also put information and important alert boxes on a specific page.

The banner is a yellow strip across the top of the site that contains a summary of the issue and usually has a link to where you can read more.

Here are some examples where we would use a banner.

• Bin collection changes
• Online form problems and technical issues
• Flood alerts and flood information
• Problems with our phone lines
• Highway and transport problems
• Bank holiday opening hours

Short web addresses and redirects

We shorten the web addresses of pages when it is going to be used in a publication or article. We try to shorten it to something easy to use and remember.

For example www.somerset.gov.uk/pothole links to our report a problem on the road page that has this web address https://www.somerset.gov.uk/roads-travel-and-parking/report-a-problem-on-the-road/

Our pages get redirected when the bulk of the information can be found somewhere else. This may be because the amount of information increases and needed its own site or area or someone else was also covering the information elsewhere.

For example, we redirect to archive information on the South West Heritage site. The redirect link shows in our local history and heritage menu.