In preparing to migrate their website from Sharepoint to GovCMS, the Attorney-General’s Department (AGD) engaged Pragma to help develop their content.

The AGD website had a very high readability grade level, meaning many users would struggle to understand the information and likely give up. AGD reported that users were having a poor experience as the information on the site was set out in a confusing and inconsistent way.

It is important that government agency websites comply with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines meaning all users can access the information. The high number of fact sheets and downloadable PDFs on the AGD website caused many issues with accessibility and usability.

The AGD wanted to improve their content prior to moving it on to a new platform and ensure the site was easy to maintain and could continue to be improved once they were on GovCMS.

The first step for the project was conducting a content audit: looking at and analysing, using website scraping tools, all the content on the AGD site and identifying any gaps. The information learnt from the audit allowed us to make recommendations for the next phase of the project: content that required redesign or content that could be archived.

Google Analytics helped our team to understand the content that was accessed the most on the AGD site as well as user’s site behaviour. This was important information to know for later redesigns.

Our consultants also manually analysed much of the content  to address the highest priority content to begin redeveloping.

From the content audit our team was able to create a Content Strategy covering UX best practice and recommendations structured around four principles:

Editorial: editorial goals and objectives, voice and tone guidelines.

Experience: Content usability, including how simple information was to find and consume as well as accessibility.

Operations: Content governance, operations and workflows.

Continuous Improvement: Tactics and strategies to improve content performance measures, content maintenance and lifecycle process and next steps.

After presenting AGD with our recommendations, they were able to take on the content work required to make their site work on GovCMS Drupal.

The user experience was improved after Pragma rewrote much of the content on the site, bringing the readability level from grade 12 to grade 6.

Pragma helped the AGD to design a new taxonomy based on the information learnt from the content audit and what user’s were searching for and doing on the site.