Land and sea, life and pleasure on Ängelholm municipality's new website

Accessible, userfriendly and conveying the feeling of Ängelholm as a coastal city with a history, breathing of land and sea. Those were the goals when Ängelholm Municipality's website was to be rebuilt. IT consulting company Meridium was mandated to implement the solution and now, after the relaunch of the site, the visitor’s statistics spike upwards.

The challenge

A municipality web contains a large amount of information, with everything from information on culture and tourism, childcare and school, to traffic and infrastructure. Previously the site had been difficult to read and hard to navigate. Therefore one of the goals for the new site was to make it easy to navigate and accessible to all who seek information. Ängelholm Municipality also wanted their web to convey a sense of Ängelholm as attractive to tourists and wanted the residents to recognize the positive image of Ängelholm.

Everything needed to be redone and one of the temporal challenges was to rewrite all the content in order to make it clearer. Since the website will reach out to a broad target audience of both locals, tourists, young and elderly and persons with disabilities, it was important to make the web site accessible - both technically, visually and linguistically.

The solution

Meridium built a brand new website based on the publishing system EPiServer and worked constantly with the accessibility in focus. During the process of creating an easy to understand content, for example, the editors attended a special course to learn how to write easy to understand and accessible content.

Other examples of the accessibility work are the integrated listening feature available on every page. There is also an easy to read button where the pages are translated into easy to read Swedish. This is to enable people with various disabilities to use the site.

Ängelholm Municipality also chose to use the tool SiteValidator, which automatically checks that a number of basic requirements for accessibility are met when new pages are created. It also makes changes on already existing pages.

For Rebecca Lindell, the site's project manager, it was easy to select both tools and supplier because she had previous experience from working with Meridium.

- SiteValidator works just great", Rebecca Lindell says. "You get a report with links to pages that have not passed the validation test. Then you go directly to that page and edit. It's very easy to work with SiteValidator when you get everything set up that way

On their new site Ängelholm Municipality will also work a lot with images in order to clarify and emphasize the feeling.  Therefore they needed a skilled imaging tool, which they found in ImageVault.

- As everyone knows, a picture says more than words and can convey an emotion and make content easier to absorb. Of course the picture has to belong in its context and have a link to the text", Rebecca Lindell continues.

Ängelholm Municipality needed to get good structure of all the images and ImageVault's use of categories and metadata created this. The images are also searchable and have a clear interface.

Results

New Ängelholm.se is an accessible and user-friendly website. Thanks to pictures and direct texts the site is easy to understand and it conveys a sense of Ängelholm as a living coastal city. Clarity and structure makes it easy for visitors to access all the different kinds of information that the site contains.

Before the construction of a new website the most important thing, according to Rebecca Lindell, is to set clear goals, prioritize within them and to be realistic.

- We wanted to focus mainly on accessibility, for example. By doing that you probably have to cut the budget for cool design.

She also gives other pieces of advice on the way, for instance that everyone in the project should have clear assignments and that it's important to check status often during the course of the project. Rebecca Lindell is very satisfied with the cooperation with Meridium:

- It has been great. During our workshops the people from Meridium have been sensitive to our wishes and needs, even when we as customers have not been able to explain ourselves clearly. That's a huge strength. When the final result was presented I discovered that everything was there - even things I had forgotten we had discussed. When that happens it feels incredibly good to have chosen Meridium as a supplier. It also helps a lot that they are very nice and easy as persons.