THE DECISION The project team explored the SaaS option and found it was worth progressing. Reeve explains: “We found that the cost of deploying a SaaS website is a fraction of what the council would have spent on a more ‘traditional’ form of website procurement. With a SaaS provider, a single payment covered all licensing and hosting costs as part of the service. We also found that the council could take advantage of having a globally supported service that has been developed to look great and to be simple to update and administer.” After investigating many online providers, the team decided that the service provided by SquareSpace would be the best fit. Reeve explains: “They offered a great range of templates and functions with excellent support and were endorsed by a large range of existing global business customers.” Using SquareSpace would cost the council just $18 a month (about £13.70) if it was bought on an annual basis. This included full, unlimited use of their platform, hosting and bandwidth. This meant an unprecedented saving of around £12,900 a year. But there are some limitations. Users are limited to using one of SquareSpace’s templates, the website performs best with under 400 pages (the council had 900 on its old site) and the web administrator permissions are ‘all or nothing’.
However, the project team took this as an opportunity to promote change within the council and used the restrictions as a way of working more efficiently. Reeve continues: “The page limit is something we have found useful to prevent the new website spawning out of control. Our old site had around 900 pages, but when we finish the project, we are expecting to have around 200 pages. The limit on web administrator permissions is also something
FEEDBACK As part of the development of the website, the project team has worked with staff, councillors and with the public (using its online citizens’ panel for feedback) and has, boldly, published access to the beta site to invite more public feedback before the launch at the end of November. Reeve continued: “So far, the response has been overwhelmingly positive and extremely constructive. In fact, many of the
Website Design
BUSINESS INFORMATION FOR LOCAL AND CENTRAL GOVERNMENT – www.governmentbusiness.co.uk
The council’s old website was expensive – a total of £13,100 per year which is a significant amount for a small local authority with a rapidly declining budget that we can work with as we are a small council – around 200 members of staff – and only need around six to eight people to maintain and manage the content, giving them full access to the website to ensure the site can always be updated. “The templates provided by SquareSpace are a very high quality, fully supported and perform well on any technology. Once we found a template we liked it was quickly customised to our branding and then we were able to begin loading content.”
suggestions have already been implemented and we will continue to incorporate as much feedback as possible into the final design. “We’re all looking forward to launching the new website next month and working with a system that saves us time and money and delivers a vastly improved user experience for our customers.” L FURTHER INFORMATION www.tewkesbury.gov.uk www.squarespace.com
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