Building a new www.birmingham.gov.uk

Overview

For many years the navigation structure of our website has followed the nationally-recognised Local Government Navigation List, but more recently us and a number of other councils around the country have come to feel that no longer meets the needs of a modern council website.
Solution
Our solution is a radical transformation of the navigation structure based less on council structures and more on segmenting the site according to who our various groups of customers are and what they would like to do on it. Following this the content will also be redesigned accordingly, and new functionality to our site added as appropriate.
Methodology
In order to ensure our new site will meet the needs of all of our customers, we will be developing it gradually over time in a parallel site, and you are encouraged to comment and feedback to us with your thoughts. We will also be blogging the process as we go along on the same site so you can see our thinking as it develops.
First step
Initially, we have created an outline navigation structure around our five new top levels which give an indication of how we expect the new site will fit together - it is not a comprehensive structure containing all of our content, rather we hope it is just enough to demonstrate our initial thinking and to give scope to expand it further. Later, we will start adding actual content to the pages as we develop a new house style, and then we will start to focus more closely on the graphic design of a new site.