Waverley Borough Council is based in Surrey and serves a population of over 120,000 people. They are passionate about the community they serve and are responsible for a huge amount of services and for providing easy to find information to their residents.

The Brief

After winning the project, through a Government Tender Portal, the brief for the website required us to focus on providing a good user experience for residents in and around Waverley and it was important that it complied with the required accessibility standards. The website needed to be easy for editors and admins to maintain and they also required content to be approved by moderators before it was published live up to the website.

What We Did

Due to Covid this entire project was built during the first National Lockdown whilst Waverley Borough Council and Purple Creative were working from home, very much demonstrating the flexibility of both teams.

Using the existing brand guidelines, and after looking at the site analytics, we devised a number of mobile first designs which we then distilled down to create the final design for all devices. The web build was started and we provided extensive training, over zoom, to the Waverley team so we could work in tandem to deploy the page structure and add in the content.

We also built a bespoke workflow system allowing moderators to approve content added to the site by content creators and created a method for users to rate individual pages and provide feedback which was incredibly important to Waverley Borough Council.

Outcome

We have built and sustained a long term relationship with Waverley Borough Council, they edit the website themselves but have an annual support arrangement in place with Purple for more technical or advanced issues.

Due to the scale of the project, we provided a dedicated hosting server package for the website which we continue to maintain and support on their behalf.

“We first started working with Purple Creative on the redesign of our main council website.

Working within the brief and our brand guidelines, they delivered a responsive and fresh-looking design to modernise what is our main ‘front door’ to our digital services.

We continue to use their support services to help with the technical aspects of the site and the whole team has been brilliant to work with – always very responsive, friendly and professional whenever I get in touch.

Their technical knowledge and advice has helped me to continue developing the site for the benefit of our users, while sharing any new knowledge gained with my colleagues to help create a continuous cycle of improvement.”

Henry Ascoli-Digital Customer Experience and Website Manager