City Council honoured for new website

Birmingham City Council has been awarded official Honouree status in the 2017 Webby Awards, the leading international award honouring excellence on the internet, this week.

The new birmingham.gov.uk website, launched in August 2016, was recognised in the Public Sector and Activism category, under Mobile Sites and Apps sector.

Birmingham City Council is Europe’s largest local authority serving over one million customers and its website attracts 4,486,793  unique visitors a year.

It commissioned Jadu – which has since split into two firms, Jadu and Spacecraft Digital – with an entire rebrand of the website and engaging Birmingham’s residents every step of the way.

Paula Buckley, assistant director, customer service at Birmingham City Council, said: “One of our core objectives in the redesign was tackling resident concerns around a lack of mobile responsiveness, so to be recognised in the mobile category in particular is fantastic.

“A Webby is the internet’s highest honour but ultimately it’s down to how our residents find the service and so far, the feedback has been outstanding.”

While developing the new-look website, both the city council and Spacecraft Digital focused on understanding residents and undertook workshops and tested the site’s accessibility, user journey and content categorisations. The interaction and feedback from residents and regular website users was crucial to the redesign.

Data on Birmingham’s demographics, browser usage and languages spoken across the city (over 149 languages detected, English was not always the first language) was used to determine homepage ‘top tasks’.

Matt Culpin, Creative Director at Spacecraft Digital said: “What really excited us about Birmingham was the council’s commitment and desire to keep citizens at the forefront of the journey. The entire design process followed an Agile approach allowing for continuous iterations and improvement throughout the research process.”

The council invested £225,000 in the website design and build, which is powered by Jadu Continuum.

ENDS

Notes to editors:

The winners of the 2017 Webby Awards will be announced later this year.

Established in 1996 during the internet’s infancy, The Webbys are presented by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences (IADAS).