The West of England Combined Authority is made up of three councils in the West of England: Bristol, South Gloucestershire and Bath and North East Somerset.
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The West of England Combined Authority is made up of three councils in the West of England: Bristol, South Gloucestershire and Bath and North East Somerset.
JBi Digital was appointed to build an industry leading website for the Combined Authority, bringing together each of its existing websites under one roof:
Our key objectives for this project were to:
The Combined Authority’s new website needed to represent 8 separate internal teams, each with its own priorities for serving residents, businesses and stakeholders.
The Discovery phase was therefore focused on ensuring that each team was able to contribute directly and make its unique voice heard.
To achieve this, we ran a dedicated workshop with each team, deep diving into their objectives and priorities and exploring the needs of their various audiences.
The insights gained from this process, coupled with our analysis of the Combined Authority’s existing websites, helped form our strategy for the rest of the project.
We also defined which areas of the sites should be global, and which would need to be unique for each section. For example, the Combined Authority and the Growth Hub share a case study page but their events pages are distinct from one another.
The outputs of these workshops directly informed the new sitemap and information architecture, which you can read more about in the next section.
It was essential to the success of this project that the consolidated sitemap was optimised for the Combined Authority’s residents, businesses and stakeholders.
In order to achieve this, we conducted a full audit of each website’s content, working with the client’s teams to identify which pages should be retained and removed.
Our SEO team then ensured that all content was migrated in an SEO-friendly manner, with 301 redirects added for all deleted pages.
In total:
Based on the outputs of this exercise and the insights gained during the Discovery phase, we were able to produce a full sitemap covering all three websites.
Based on the Combined Authority’s brief and following our initial discussions with the team, we decided that the best solution would be to develop the website using a WordPress multisite CMS.
This achieved the following:
Building the website in this way has given the Combined Authority a scalable, future-proof platform which allows its internal teams to tailor their sections to their audiences’ unique needs.
This multisite architecture was tied together by a dynamic website header, which you can read more about in the following section.
The West of England Combined Authority’s new website has been a resounding success.
It has helped to reinvigorate the Combined Authority’s online presence, while significantly improving the user experience for residents, businesses and stakeholders, as shown below:
The website complies with WCAG 2.1 accessibility standards, and we have provided documentation and training to the Combined Authority’s teams in order to ensure that all new content and imagery added to the site remains within the guidelines.
We have created an optimised hosting solution, providing significant cost-savings in comparison with the previous arrangement, which involved various hosting providers and multiple domains.
The JBi team is now supporting and maintaining the Combined Authority’s website on an ongoing basis as part of a long term digital partnership.
“JBI has been a fantastic partner for the design and delivery of our new corporate website. While working remotely, we have been able to consolidate three legacy websites into one engaging new website, focused on meeting the needs of our varied audiences (local residents, businesses, and stakeholders). The JBi team was responsive to feedback, creative and personable – and was able to deliver our new website both on time and on budget.”
Alison Barrat, Marketing Manager at the West of England Combined Authority
If you have a project that you would like to discuss with the JBI team, please don’t hesitate to get in touch by calling 0207 043 2510 or emailing us through hello@jbidigital.co.uk.
