As an online city hall, Gemert-Bakel Municipality’s website had to ensure easy and efficient access to information, forms, and online services for all residents.
The municipality was quite simply unaware of the state of their website’s accessibility and struggled with the workload associated with serving an entire online community.
Monsido, powered by Acquia
With Monsido, Gemert-Bakel has been able to achieve a much greater understanding of their website's accessibility compliance, effortlessly maintain high-quality and targeted content, and continue to improve the overall user experience. Monsido has empowered the digital team to efficiently manage all their website-related activities and ensure all residents have equal access to public information.
The website for the municipality of Gemert-Bakel, located in the southern Netherlands, plays a vital role in providing residents with relevant and up-to-date information, such as procedures for renewing driving licenses or passports. The website also offers a wide range of services to residents, including requesting garbage drop-offs and filing complaints conveniently from their homes.
Rob van der Broek serves as the webmaster/functional manager for the municipality of Gemert-Bakel. As an online city hall, the municipality’s website must ensure easy and efficient access to information, forms, and online services for all residents. While van der Broek and his colleagues recognized the importance of providing an inclusive and productive website – including efficiency gains from reducing the time spent on answering inquiries via phone and email – they lacked visibility into the state of accessibility of their website and faced various challenges to manage the workload associated with serving an entire online community.
In order to achieve their goals, the Gemert-Bakel Municipality first wanted to prioritize web accessibility compliance and ensure inclusivity by providing understandable information for all residents. They also had to tackle the frustration experienced by residents when they encountered links that were either broken or led to the wrong information, as well as the appearance of broken images caused by the uploading of oversized images. Lastly, they faced the challenge of making all documents accessible, as many content writers were unfamiliar with accessibility requirements.
The Gemert-Bakel Municipality ultimately chose Monsido as its preferred solution due to three core factors: Monsido’s comprehensive overview of website health, its affordability, and the user-friendly interface.
The Monsido solutions Gemert-Bakel implemented to overcome their challenges and enhance website accessibility and inclusivity included:
Moreover, Monsido's relative affordability made it an instantly attractive solution – an understandably crucial factor for a public organization with tight budgetary constraints.
Monsido offered an invaluable tool that provided van der Broek and his team with a comprehensive overview of their website's health and significantly streamlined the municipality’s overall website maintenance.
First and foremost, the Monsido platform played a crucial role in enhancing website accessibility by allowing van der Broek and his team to quickly and easily identify and resolve web health issues, ensuring that all residents could access information and services without encountering barriers. Monsido also helped the municipality maintain high-quality content throughout the website, including the identification of several remediation issues that had previously plagued the municipality’s catalogue of documents and reports.
The Monsido browser extension enabled the team to identify and resolve issues directly within the municipality’s content management system (CMS), saving substantial time and effort. The tool is particularly useful during accessibility audits, as it allows the team to document their progress and track efforts made to improve website accessibility.
In addition, van der Broek and his team found that the industry-leading Monsido platform provided valuable insights into the popularity of the municipality's different webpages, thus enabling the development of more targeted content catering specifically to areas and subjects that piqued resident interest. This continuous assessment of visitor trends has led to the creation of content that is more responsive and tailored to residents’ needs, boosting the website’s user experience and the reputation of the municipality itself.
