Nottingham City CouncilWeb strategy: how to become the site of choice for local

residents

By

Pete Stevens – GOSS Interactive

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Agenda

ObjectivesImplementationResultsFuture

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Website drivers

Nottingham City Council online objectives

• My Nottingham to become the place for information and services

Website:

• Provide easy access to council and non-council information

• Provide easy self-service tools

• Create an engaging environment with “stickability”

Off site:

• Make the site discoverable

• Push content to Social Media sites

• Publicise the site offline

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Driving traffic to your site

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Tips for content success

• Put the thing that people want to do on the homepage

• Don’t explain what your site is for

• Make the process simple• You are taking your customers time – make their

life easy• It is not a murder mystery

• A link is a promiseGerry McGovern

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User personas

City Centre Worker

“Excellence comes from innovation.”

 

Name: Jonathan Hull

Age: 37 

Employment: East Midlands trains

Job title: IT Manager

Information needs:

• IT/Marketing info

• What’s on and going out

• Social networking

• Notts Forest FC

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User personas

Secondary School teacher

“Bringing culture to kids.”

 

Name: Clair Wells

Age: 41

Employment: Fernwood School

Job title: English and Art history teacher

Information needs:

• What’s on (art and theatre)

• Teaching resources

• Bees

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Driving traffic to your site

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Nottingham on Google

• Google lists 36,300 page for site:www.nottinghamcity.gov.uk

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How Google works – Google view

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How Google works – user view

• 50% of searchers are using key phrases with three words or longer

• 30% of users search with two word phrases

• 13% search with one word key phrases [Source: e-consultancy]

So:

• Embed relevant key words into your content, but not at the expense of meaning and readability.

• Your message should be crafted around what people are searching for.

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Daily visits

Bounce rate (come to the site and leave immediately)

Average time on site

Sources (where visitors come from)

Popular pages (where visitors go)

Results(Population 264,000)

March 2009• 164,427 visits• 106,668 unique visits• 641,477 page views

Traffic sources• 60% search• 21% referring sites• 19% direct

October 2009• 259,200 visits• 159,612 unique visits• 921,405 page views

Traffic sources• 57% search• 26% referring sites• 16% direct

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33%

Awards and acolades

Silver award at the LG Communications Reputation Award ceremony in the Digital Media category 2009.

• “The winning entries provide first rate examples of how to build reputations, showing the importance of a strategic approach, clear objectives and creativity.“ Edward Welsh, Programme Director, Media and Campaign, LGA

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Future ideas

• What does it enable?– Single sign on for the web– Login once

• What makes it special?– No-one owns it– Open– Free– Extensible

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...Intranet

• Instant messenger, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn in a company environment - using and building on ... GOSS iCM

• Core functionality: project teams and pages

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Any questions?

Follow: @gossinteractive