Most of the content on this intranet is made up of ex county council information due to the county intranet being turned off. Please read the blog to find out more about how we have developed this new intranet and where you can go to find information that relates to you.
Design and build
Developing a product ready for launch.
Building your website
Once the digital team and stakeholders have reviewed prototypes and are happy with a minimal viable product, the development team can move on to the build. This is usually the most technically difficult part and is undertaken by Digital Design and Development officers and Senior Development officers.
We use LocalGov Drupal as our platform and maintain sustainable code bases for both the corporate website and microsites.
Populate content
At this stage, the skeleton of the website has been built in a developer or "test" environment. It is not live but can be worked on and improved. It is usable at this stage and can be tested with users.
This is where we will take the revised content and populate the pages with the copy. This allows an additional opportunity to refine and iterate on what has been produced.
SEO and keywords
By populating the content, you can start to see a fuller picture of the website. At this stage, the content team would also be optimising the SEO by adding keywords to the backend of the pages and ensuring the content includes keywords that users may be searching for.
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation. It is about making your website easier to find on search engines like Google - without paying for ads.
When someone searches for something online, SEO helps your site show up in the results. It works by:
- using the right words (called keywords) that people are searching for
- making sure your site is easy to read and loads quickly
- organising your content, so search engines understand it
Review
At this point, the website will be shared with stakeholders so they can also see its progress and provide feedback. We will always refer to the initial design brief and keep in mind if it meets “good” in our MVP standards.
If additional ideas out of scope are created at this stage, it will be decided if this is added in before go-live, or if it’s considered as a post-live iteration.
Once the website is in a good place, it will also be reviewed by the product lead, senior developer and designers, also known as a peer review.
Peer review
Peer review is when someone else on your team checks your work before it’s final.
They give feedback, suggest improvements, and help make sure everything is clear, correct, and useful.
It's useful for:
- helping catch mistakes early
- improving the quality of your work
- bringing in fresh ideas or perspectives
- making sure your work meets team standards
- making sure the final result meets the goals
Quality assurance
The quality assurance process in web development generally tests aspects like:
- functionality - checking each feature of the website to ensure it works properly
- usability - observing how easy it is for testers to perform certain tasks on the website
- user interface - testing visual elements to ensure they're displayed properly
- responsiveness - testing how the website is displayed on different screen sizes
- broken links - clicking on each link and button to ensure no 404 error pages are displayed and that it goes to the correct area
- performance - running tests to evaluate metrics like page speed, bounce rate and error rate
- security - scanning the website for vulnerabilities
Sign off
Once the site has been reviewed by the product lead, a launch date will be agreed upon with the developers and stakeholders.