Building a better website structure

Published Wednesday 8 May 2019

We found that parents find the current Local Offer website:

• illogical
• difficult to navigate
• hard to find the right information on.

Parents are busy people. They need information quicker and with less hassle. By improving the website's structure, we’re hoping to do just that.

What do we mean by 'structure'?

It's how web content is organised. An effective website structure should be clear and easy to use. The language should be simple – jargon never helps easy navigation.

Starting improvements

We took all our research – interviews, surveys, task-based testing results from the SEND online feedback group – and analysed the outcomes.

• We learnt that we weren’t prioritising some of the information parents were searching for – including short breaks and local things to do.
• We identified the most popular pages and tasks that need to be most prominent.
• Our Online Feedback Group then helped us to organise how content should be grouped together and how to label them.

We took all this and sat down to build a brand new website structure.

Next steps

We’ll know if the new website structure is a success if visitors find the information they need quicker with less searching.

We won’t make any changes though until the proposed new structure has been tested by parents. We'll be testing new structures for the next few months, however, by the autumn we'll have the new structure live.

Join our SEND online feedback group if you’d like to help us test the proposed new structure.

If you are already a member, expect an email from us soon!

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