yes, cross-market. I sometimes wonder if gov people think this is somehow wrong to be honest … this marketing malarkey …

I investigated how easy it was to find election results by googling ‘council name’ elections and other variants. The results were decidedly patchy, eg there were examples of meta descriptions of the 2005 election (rather than 2009) results (there were also two that described the 2001 results!), or results which took me to an elections main page and I then had to navigate on from there to the right place.

It is important that consideration is given in planning for election time to ensure that information from past elections moved out of the way (but still accessible). 90% of election content should be focused entirely on the election of the moment, not one that happened 12 or 48 months ago.

There’s certainly scope for examining what the customer experience is going to be and plan scenarios around your findings. I always recommend that a web team should test drive a couple of unfamiliar councils’ websites (with over 400 to choose from there will always be one that’s new to you!) to seek out information, identifying along the way neat touches that work and could be employed on their own website, but principally to pinpoint things that jar, that don’t work, that make the customer think (unnecessarily). This applies across the board, not just to elections.

I completely agree that elections are a great opportunity for promoting the council’s website, an opportunity not to be missed. But don’t forget to cross-sell other council services or information resources via the key election pages – you’ve landed a visitor to your website, so encourage them to have a poke around other content and get hooked!

RT @simonwakeman: Blog: Elections and council websites – a great opportunity [link to post] #socitm #uklocalgovweb

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