Back in late September 2012, as part of my work at Birmingham City Council, I instigated and led on a programme of incremental improvements to the council's website, blogging about the ideas and progress along the way, taking inspiration from Shropshire Council's Project WIP and the Government Digital Service work on www.gov.uk. The site on which I blogged has been taken down now, but I thought it worth reposting the more broad-reaching content from it here.
In thinking about the future shapes of our council websites, we all of course understand the need to perform brutally honest ROTE analyses of every single page on our sites, and likewise we’re all geared up for restructuring our websites and the content in them according to properly thought through content strategies.
So we know we need to get rid of those pointless pages about stuff the council has nothing to do with such as the history of Birmingham’s canals, or the history and recipe behind Eccles cakes, right?
Not so fast!
Both of those pages – canals on our own website, and Eccles cakes on the website for Salford City Council, are both in the local history sections of the website, and whilst some people might suggest the responsibility of councils for the curation and dissemination of local history might be tenuous in the modern era, it still does remain a function of many council library services. So you might believe – as actually I did until relatively recently – that whilst this content belongs on the web somewhere such as Wikipedia and could indeed still be maintained by an appropriate member of council staff in council time, since this kind of thing doesn’t represent a part of the core council services we need to promote to the public it doesn’t belong on the main council website.
Not so fast!
In the last three months, our canals landing page has received 1,528 pageviews out of the total of 9,602,547, or 0.02% of the total. Not massive overall, by any means, but over a period of three months, 500 pageviews a month is still a reasonably sized number, especially when you realise that’s 17 pageviews a day.
So why are the pages important? After all, who goes to the council website looking for information about canals and Eccles cakes?
If you type ‘Canals in Birmingham‘ into Google you’ll see why instantly – at the time of writing, our canals landing page is the number one result. Similarly, a Google search for ‘Eccles cakes‘ has the Salford page in the still reasonably respectable position of number seven on the results page.
In a nutshell, these pages provide our sites as a whole with valuable Google-juice – they’re important items of content relevant to our cities, which a search for information about those subjects leads people to our sites; people who might not otherwise have visited our sites, and people who once they are here, a well-constructed, well-laid-out site with good cross-sell links can remind them that as well as finding a recipe for their favourite morning snack, they can also sort out their council tax, report a pothole, and book a bulky waste collection, and all the other core services we are trying to channel shift them from the telephone to the website to carry out. Not necessarily now whilst they’re still thinking about breakfast, but in the future when they need it.
The Presidents of Google-juice at the time this article was originally written were Woodlands Junior School in Kent – they’ve got a separate learning resources site packed with so much information a surprising number of Google searches brings up their site in the top ten, even on content that has no relation to their function as a school – they positively own the front page on a search for ‘British life and culture‘, with the top seven results all pointing to their sites!
So returning to the Trivial content in our ROTE analysis, whilst we still need to be vicious in declaring truly trivial content as ready for deletion, before spiking anything out of hand, stop and think – ‘could this content be drawing people to the site through search queries? Could it be improved in any way to better bring people in?’ A page which contains nothing more than a graphic of a poster for a campaign will probably indeed be categorised as trivial to be deleted, as might a page containing no more than a handful of vague facts about the campaign’s topic which have themselves been sourced from a Google search on the grounds of being unlikely to generate inbound traffic from searches – but if the page has something important, relevant, authoritative, and most importantly unique to say on the topic, then the chances are it will still have some value – so long as it requires little by way of ongoing maintenance, and its existence isn’t likely to get in the way of visitors accessing the more important content we know we need to prioritise.