Improvement plan · Step 1 of 7: Why

Four services carry most of your website's demand. Do you know which?

Before you fix anything, decide which resident tasks deserve your team's time, and be able to say why.

Get the plan template All seven steps

The problem

A council website signposts more than 300 types of service, from adult social care to planning. With a small web team, the content usually comes from departments, so the site ends up mirroring the org chart. Every page feels equally important, and the team spends its week on whoever asked last.

The story

I spent years working in service design for councils. One of the first things we did was look at demand. Bin collections, council tax, benefits and parking always came out on top, while some services were barely visited. Once you see that, the question changes from "which page is broken?" to "which tasks do most residents come for, and do those work?"

Ask yourself the blunt version: who would miss your website if it was gone? If residents aren't part of the answer, that's where to start.

"The trouble with not having a goal is that you can spend your life running up and down the field and never score."

What to do

List the reasons residents come to your site, as tasks: "pay my council tax", "report a missed bin", not "the council tax page".
Write a SMART objective for each one that matters: specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound. For example: "This quarter, 20% more residents report a missed bin online."
Rank them Must, Should or Could, using demand and the council's own plan.
Pick one Must. That's the task you take through the next six steps.

"We want a million page views a month" is not an objective: it says nothing about residents and nothing about when. On a large site, objectives can cascade: a council-wide one at the top, a service one under it and a page one under that, so everyone's effort points the same way.

A clear objective also gives you a polite way to say no to work that won't help residents.