Website Project Update - Weeknotes #2
By: Andy Williams-Jones
Tags: Website Design, Govdesign, Weeknotes, Web Design, Website

Gambling Commission Website Project — Weeknotes #2

Progress updates from the team delivering a new Gambling Commission website.

Our 2nd sprint into this project (we work in 2 week sprints) so this update covers week 3 and 4 of the project.

We have decided to focus our attention on one of the sites the Gambling Commission manages which is separate to our main website. The website we are going to tackle first, is the Advisory Board for Safer Gambling website (absg.org.uk) it’s a body that advises the Gambling Commission on reducing gambling-related harm.

It’s a small website with just a few content types and low visitor count. We are going to use this website as a test-bed for identifying content types, testing a new Content Management System (CMS) and also how we actually do prototyping with a CMS for our main website which will be next.

Current website homepage screenshot

Screenshot of current website homepage.

We are using this sprint to identify the content types on the site and using Sketch, prototype out the new content types to understand how these might look in our service frontend framework, with some revised branding.

We used Maze to do usability testing and it’s given us some really good support to defining our navigation structure. Being such a small website, it’s been relatively easy to create maze missions.

We have gone internal with these tests initially, we hope to get an Alpha website out in the next couple of weeks and see how that performs through analytics and using Mouseflow to record visitor interaction.

On that, we’ve made good progress on the HTML prototype with most pages identified built and working with content migrated from the old site, into the new CMS. We have work to do on making the content itself accessible but it’s a start.

One feature we really needed to work on for the website is the menu and site navigation styling. I really like how the NHS.UK site does this and how it works across different devices. As their code is available openly I’ve taken it and reworked the colours to make it work for the ABSG website.

We held a design crit on a few pages where we’re doing something new. We have adopted the guide page design to split content up with an overarching contents list. So getting the team together to get feedback on specific aspects of the design is important. It’s also the first time we’ve done a design crit like this.

GC website

We held a workshop to go through the top 30 pages of our site and identify patterns, what we like/don’t like, problems and things to tackle in our design work.

We also identified content types. While the ABSG website has about 8 content types (some are very similar) the GC wesbite has significantly more, currently around 25

We have continued to work on the Information Architecture of the website to understand how content relates to each other and the complexity of information that we have.

This is a massive piece of work as we have a lot of content covering the public, gambling businesses, legislation and licensing authorities.

We’ve also started the ball rolling on updates to stakeholders and how we’re going to do show and tells and run project governance.

Next sprint

We will be starting to look at designing out some ideas for our main website as well as planning on getting the Alpha website out alongside the existing ABSG website and tackling the content reviews.