Published: 17 November 2023
Hutt City Council has taken out the 2023 website of the year award.
The accolade was presented at last night’s Association of Local Government Information Management (ALGIM) Awards 2023.
With more than 78 councils and 2 council-controlled organisations (CCOs) audited this is something to be proud of! The website was a former Go Digital Programme project and is managed to its award-winning level by the Customer Experience Team.
Customer Experience Advisor, Nicole Noldus says that our role is to serve our community and one of the best ways to do that is to provide them with the information they are looking for.
“Presenting this in an accessible way ensures everyone can find, access, and understand what they need to. Getting information into our customers hands up front also means our Customer Services Team and Front Desk support staff can spend more time looking after more difficult enquiries, so it has a benefit throughout the business,” she says.
The ALGIM Web Audit is undertaken to provide a stock-take and trends of how councils are tracking to comply with web standards, enhance accessibility, increase their digital services, engagement and website presence within the local government sector.
The objectives delivered from the ALGIM web audit results are to:
1. Identify a ranking of sites - celebrate those councils working to achieve compliance with web standards, enhance accessibility, and functionality; and provide justification for councils wishing to improve their site.
2. Record the current state of standards compliance, functionality, online services, accessibility, and best practice amongst council websites.
Hutt City Council’s first place result is up on last year’s third place ranking. To ensure our website continues to serve its purpose well, Nicole regularly invests in the following:
- Ensuring structure and layout within the website is consistent - this ensures ease of navigation for the customer
- Tidying issues within pages - broken links, stray html tags (usually left over when content was removed or copied and replaced)
- When training new staff including emphasis on ensuring accessibility requirements like alt text for images are included
- Utilising reports from Monsido and Squiz to identify areas where we can improve our accessibility score from a technical standpoint
- When doing content reviews with business units making sure content is reviewed to meet our plain English standards
Hutt City Council was also one of four finalists this year in their respective categories, well done to the Getting stuff off Trim (G-sot), Customer Service Experience Project, Building Consent Digitisation Project and Finance services refresh project.