Deirdre Sharrock
Webmaster
Deirdre is Webmaster for Meath County Council. Recently, she has been involved in all aspects of a project which included redesigning the website, intranet and extranet, and integrating them into the content management system. The website was launched in October 2006. It is a portal website for Meath County Council and includes Local Authorities, Community, Business and Tourism sections.
Deirdre is a CIW (Certified Internet Webmaster) Professional and CIW Associate.
She started her career in website design in 1999. Prior to joining Meath County Council, Deirdre worked in Nua Ltd., where she worked on web projects for clients including Guinness, Lucent, Oracle, and Barclays Bank.
Introducing a Practical Toolkit for Website Projects
Wednesday, November 8th, 11.00
Category: Intermediate
Track: Web Communication
Visitors of a government website doesn't want to hang around - they want to complete a task in the fastest possible time. They will spend less than one minute figuring out your homepage, if they haven't been to your website before. Your Government website needs to be simple to use, customer-centric, and practical.
Similarly, a website contributor doesn't want to spend ages figuring out or trying to remember how to add content, or how to write effective content that is suitable for the web. This needs to be a simple task aided by quality training, relevant back-up material, and proper support.
In her talk, Deirdre will focus on the practical steps taken during her government website project to:
- Produce a user-friendly, customer-centric website
- Simplify the task of contributing quality content to the website
The various elements of the toolkits will be briefly reviewed and finally Deirdre will touch on some of her lessons learned from working with the toolkits.
Toolkit 1 - How to Keep it Simple for the Website Visitor:
- Content and Functionality Questionnaire
- Engaging Usability Specialists
- Information Architecture Workshop - Card Sorting Exercises
- Public User Testing
- Requirements / Information Gathering
- Structure, Wireframe Diagrams, and Paper Prototype
- Website Analysis Workshop
Toolkit 2 - How to Keep it Simple for the Website Contributor:
- CMS Quick Guides
- Content - Use the Website Structure document, and make a list of Website Main Sections. Allocate each Main Section with an Approver (with agreement from Management)
- Create a Word/text document for each Main Section, listing the links under each
- Follow-up Training - Assist with inserting real content with the Contributor (can be done remotely)
- Ongoing Support
- Quality CMS Training
- Request Contributors' names for each link from the Approvers
- Result - a website structure document containing the names of Website Links, Approvers and Contributors. Users are aware of content responsibility and how their section fits into the new website
- Set up a folder structure on a common drive that reflects the devised website structure and create Word/text documents for each link with tips on writing for the Web at the top
- Writing for the Web Training
Joint session with case presented by Adriaan Bloem from Leiden University.
Download:
View the schedule.
