Speaking your language — building a content style guide to create a website that talks to users
Hi, I’m Kate from Bath & North East Somerset council, and I’m a Content Designer in our web team. It’s a job that aims to bridge the gap between the technology of servers and code which builds a site that works, and the needs and expectations of the public, who’ll be using that site to achieve everyday tasks like getting a bus pass, ordering a garden waste bin, or checking the on-street parking in Bath.
Making the online option the most attractive for people who want to use it saves everyone time and money — but we can only achieve this if the website is clear, easy and (we hope!) enjoyable to use.
So, where do we start, if we’re trying to create a council site that speaks your language? If you’ve been following our blog, you’ll know that we’ve built our own B&NES version of the Government Digital Service’s web building toolkit (read more about that here). At the simplest level, this lends our site a consistent look and feel. It means that if you want to find your local library, or apply for a benefit, for example, the web page you see will present information, and point you towards actions, in recognisable ways.
Easy website navigation is a lot more than just recognising which buttons to press, of course. It involves organising the information around what you need to know, and where you might expect to find it. To do this, we’ve done research into the pages our residents use most, and what they do there. Tools like Google Analytics show us which parts of the site are popular, and the pages which are gathering digital dust, and this helps us redesign the content you need, organised in a way that will make sense and get your council business done easily and quickly.
At the page level, ‘heatmapping’ online content with a tool such as HotJar shows how users read online: scanning quickly across the first headings and lines of text, and then down in an ‘F’ shape. Typically, we look at just 28% of a webpage, so content design works around getting the message across clearly, and fast, by putting the most important things where you’ll find them first. Testing with real users, with different levels of digital ability, brings our work to people who are seeing it for the first time, and quickly exposes any areas where we’ve assumed too much, or lack the clarity that people need.
Like every aspect of the website development process, building a content style guide is an iterative process. User needs drive everything we do, and as we understand those better, our content evolves to meet them. We create more pages, better solutions for each interaction emerge, and over time we start to formalise the parallels between how we guide users through discounts and passes, services and obligations: all of the complex areas of local life that the council looks after.
The style guide is like a manual, recording this evolution. It aims to ensure that the site we’re making now suits our users best, and that we can build on it seamlessly in the future, to do things we haven’t even thought of yet.
