I’m fresh back from a work trip to Liverpool where I and clients from the PSNI met with the Merseyside Police web manager.
If you’ve ever visited the Merseyside Police website you will see that so far as content is concerned it’s an excellent site, miles ahead of any other UK police force. It clearly demonstrates an organisation committed to publishing quality content with support from the very top, as seen in the Chief Constable’s regular web chats.
The Merseyside web manager carried out extensive research to get to where their site is today asking a range of questions to people of all ages. The main focus of our visit today was to find out how they went about implementing some of their features, to learn lessons and put them into practice as my team develop a new website for the PSNI.
With social networking high up on the public sector agenda, I was interested to learn that in their survey results site visitors actually had very little interest in podcasts or blogs. For this reason Merseyside have rightly postponed any plans to introduce such features and it made me stop in my tracks as I consider implementation of these Web 2.0 tools into the PSNI and in fact across the NICS.
Jeremy Gould has been highlighting some of the social networking type stuff central and local Government has been doing recently and it enthuses me to see the efforts being made across the board. Based on what I heard today I’d be interested in getting some metrics as to the usage and success these and similiar projects have had. Are we putting the cart before the horse or is this really what the public want?
If anything this reinforces the point that before redeveloping any website consult as much as possible, with your peers, stakeholders and the general public. As techies it can be too easy to produce leading edge websites, rich in social media etc and lose sight of the real picture. If the demand is for solid static content then presentation and delivery is where the focus should be.