Perfect 
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 order to make this whole project manageable, we need to split it up into a number of (initially five) sub-projects, from which our agile / Scrum series of products will emerge.
The sub-projects can be broadly grouped into three categories – content strategy, infrastructure, and governance. So far we have these:
Information Architecture
This is how people will navigate through the site – not just by the menu structure, but also A-Z, related links, and search. It will be looking at how content fits into the six top levels, identifying where the possible points for confusion lay, and mitigating that possible confusion.
Content
Relating to Information Architecture, we need to perform a content audit of the existing site and determine what pages we will need on the new site – the first pass being to establish what each page will cover, with subsequent passes being to actually write the new content based on matching and amending existing content to bring it in line with new content guidelines – which also need to be developed as part of this project stream.
Design
Whilst we like the design we’ve created in broad terms and think it stands well against other council websites, we know there is still work to do on it – we don’t want it to look good within its own sphere, we want it to look good on the web as a whole. We know there are tweaks here and there to do with spacing which need making – which is a coding issue – but we also know the the colour scheme needs serious attention by those more qualified to design colour than we are! And of course as well as minor tweaks, we’re aware that there may need to be more fundamental changes made in the light of feedback we receive.
CMS Technology
Whilst this project is overwhelmingly a content project rather than a technology project, there will of course be technology aspects we will need to address, including possible changes we might need to make to our content management system – Fatwire – in order to realise the work on our site proper, including changes to the HTML templates and the addition of possible new functionality such as widgetised sidebars and RSS feeds.
Governance
As well as changing the content of our website, we also need to change how the content actually gets on our website! Currently we have a wider pool of approximately 300 web editors of differing skills and amount of content to manage, dispersed according to the council’s directorate structure. The governance project will look at how best to create and manage content in the future.