The new Lincolnshire County Council website has gone live!

LCC listened to comments and ideas that came from consultation with the people of Lincolnshire. They incorporated those ideas and added some of their own to ensure information on the site can be accessed as quickly and easily as possible.

Jody Willis, Head of Design, runs through some key areas on the site.

“Listening to your customers is the best idea” said Peter Barton, Head of Web at Lincolnshire County Council (LCC). The council’s web team and the designers at Abacus took comments and ideas from internal and external consultation and, mixing them with some of their own, produced what one tweet described as “probably the best local government web site in the world”.

Peter Barton went on to say “We’ve received many compliments about our new site and less than a handful of people have commented adversely about the change. That’s very unusual when you make such radical changes to such a well used site”

Abacus worked with LCC to design the new ‘game-changing’ site, incorporating the features wanted by the county and visitors alike.

New features include drop down navigation, improved search, a better and more descriptive A-Z, visitor login for improved access to regularly used information, better use of maps and much more.

For more details on these features see ‘Whats new on the LCC site’.

The web team at LCC are very pleased with the new Webstructure.NET software and what it has enabled them to do.

Jean Trahearn, The Council’s Web Manager said.
“Webstructure.NET is a revolutionary CMS system. It has enabled us the flexibility we need as a local authority to provide a website that is not only eye-catching but functional as well. The wide range of innovative features it provides means the site will be invaluable to us and the people of Lincolnshire.“

This is a key development for Abacus too.

Stephen Cave, Project Director for the LCC relaunch said:
“It’s our first major public sector site on our new Webstructure.NET platform and we are very proud of this achievement. We have completed an intensive R&D programme to meet LCC’s deadline and succeeded in developing a highly flexible and intuitive CMS for the public sector which introduces many of the publishing techniques we have successfully deployed into the private sector”.

For more information about Webstructure.NET read our product overview and features.

A last word from Barton. “Developing a rich and fully functioning web site is a proven, cost-effective method of providing access to the information customers want. Rich, fully functioning and easy to navigate were our objectives. Abacus designers and developers ensured we met those objectives”

For more information about cost savings and our approach to a shared platform for Local Government councils, see our resources section ‘Our focus’ which contains two white papers on the subject of ‘Channel shifting’ and ‘Shared services’; there is also a cost-saving calculator to illustrate how the Webstructure.NET CMS platform helps drive down costs and drives up efficiency and productivity.

To see Peter Barton’s full comments please read New Website – Updated design offers improved website.