St Albans City & District Council

The Client

The City and District of St Albans is a local government district in Hertfordshire, England. Its council is based in St Albans, the largest settlement in the district. The district also includes several villages, including the town of Harpenden. As of 2021, St Albans has a population of 147,095.

The Situation

St Albans City & District Council is responsible for a wide variety of services including elections, museums, parks and open spaces, management and maintenance of council owned housing, the administration of housing benefits, and town planning, among many others. As a public body, St Albans not only serves a wide variety of customers with a variety of different accessibility needs, but it also is governed by public legislation and has a duty to keep up to date with the latest legal requirements. 

One of their main focus areas has been on ensuring an accessible and fluid website experience for all visitors. Adam Staples is a customer delivery manager with St Alban, responsible for maintaining both the website and external web portal and ensuring that they are up-to-date and accessible for all visitors at all transactional points throughout their journey.

Staples manages a team of 50 web editors working in specific service areas. As these editors have other core job responsibilities, web editing accounts for only a small part of their jobs.

The Challenge

For St Albans, delivering a website that is accessible and enjoyable for its citizens to use involves a number of considerations and challenges:

• Ensuring high content quality with an appropriate level of readability, as the average St Albans resident has a year 8 reading level
• Analyzing user behavior to identify key engagement and disengagement points, particularly with important transactions
• Eliminating spelling mistakes and broken links that can derail an otherwise fluid website or web portal experience
• Ensuring that unique words and spellings are detected across all pages, including enforcing a policy to always present “St Albans” as a single word
• Ensuring mobile accessibility, as mobile visitors account for an ever-increasing percentage of website traffic.
• Reducing the amount of time spent running reports on key metrics like number of page visits, time spent on a page, bounce rates, etc.

However, prior to Monsido, the web governance applications used by St Albans would force editors to log in and out every time they wanted to make a simple change or check something on their website – a laborious process that greatly reduced productivity. As a busy team of editors with other priorities to attend to, they simply did not have the time to shuffle between different systems, meaning that many website tasks would just fall by the wayside.

Asset reference

The Solution

Monsido’s industry-leading platform has made it easier for St Albans’ to meet accessibility standards and deliver an enjoyable website experience for all visitors. 

The Monsido platform has proven to be a particularly good fit for St Albans’ work style and workflow, as it allows their editors, who often have limited time and competing priorities, to take care of website issues in a manner that does not disrupt the course of their day-to-day work. According to Staples, Monsido’s highly visual and user-friendly platform has made it significantly easier for them to “do things on the fly,” meaning a lot more work on the website actually gets done.

The Results

Since adopting the Monsido platform, St Albans’ website accessibility score has increased and the team has noticed a marked improvement in their ability to remain in compliance with relevant accessibility standards and ensure an effortless and enjoyable website experience for all their customers.

In addition, the accessibility standards that St Albans are required to adhere to are constantly changing and shifting, and Monsido has been hugely helpful in proactively alerting Staples and his team to relevant changes in legislation and associated accessibility standards.

The value of the Monsido platform also extends beyond accessibility. St Albans is vigilant in its ability to remain compliant with the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and ensure that their website contains no personal information. Monsido’s Data Privacy module allowed St Albans’ web editors to stay ahead of the legal curve by ensuring no private visitor information appeared anywhere on their website.