IWMW 2010 – Good to see you all again!

It may have been wet and miserable outside, but inside Siteimprove enjoyed another great event at 2010’s IWWM event at the University of Sheffield!

It was interesting to hear how the higher education sector is finding new ways to maximise efficiency and productivity in today’s difficult climate. Linked to this, it was really great to meet with more of our customers and hear that we are helping them to reduce the pains of website management by providing quality services, such as SiteCheck and SearchImprove (which we currently have a University discount running on). It soon became apparent from various plenary sessions that there was a growing emphasis on ensuring users found the right content first time, every time – and didn’t pick up the phone. This is exactly what our services are all about and it is nice to know we can add so much value to university websites.

A big thank you must go out to everybody we managed to speak to, the UKOLN organisers and the team from the University of Sheffield.

We look forward to IWMW 2011 and meeting with everybody again!

Building Perfect Council Websites July 14th 2010

We will be exhibitors at Socitm Insight showpiece Building Perfect Council Websites conference again this year. It’s always fun and instructive to meet customers and prospects face-to-face. Siteimprove have well over 200 council customers and we do our absolute best to keep up to date with what’s going with each and every one.

All our tools are tried and tested and are targeted at saving you time and money. Each has many features prompted by the needs of councils. For example, last year’s Better connected report resulted in very popular features being introduced aimed at reducing avoidable contact on SiteAnalyze and an invaluable Autocomplete feature becoming available for SearchImprove.

You can come to our stand and we will be very pleased to show you SiteCheck, SiteAnalyze and SearchImprove working live on a council website. We will talk with you about anything council web management related!

Siteimprove to attend IWMW 2010 in Sheffield, 12-14th July

After having such a great time at last year's event, Siteimprove are delighted to announce that we will be attending Institutional Web Management Workshop (IWMW) 2010 in Sheffield, to be held at the University of Sheffield 12-14th July.

Since last year's event in Essex, Siteimprove are steadily increasing our stronghold within the educational market, and have included the likes of University College London, University of Kent and UWIC to our customer base.

To coincide with IWMW 2010 and the recent interest from universities in SearchImprove, Siteimprove's bespoke search engine, we are delighted to announce the SearchImprove University Introductory Offer. To learn more about the offer and savings that can be made, why not come and see Cerri and Gary on the Siteimprove stand?!

Siteimprove will be hosting bar camps to demonstrate two of our hosted solutions - SiteCheck (quality assurance) and SearchImprove. Don't forget to check the timetable for information on how to see our demonstrations!

IWMW 2010 promises to be a really exciting event and another great chance to learn more about the educational markets and its individual needs. If the excitement is too much and you feel you need a little boost, then remember that there will be choccies at the Siteimprove stand so come over and see the team for that extra boost that you just might need!

Learning from Better connected 2010: New challenges for local government websites

We visited the Learning from Better connected event last year for the first time and were much impressed.

The speakers were excellent and the analysis arising from the Socitm Insight: Better connected report itself was clear and concise. So much so that we added a User Journey feature to our analytics tool SiteAnalyze and now offer an autocomplete feature on our search engine SearchImprove to even better meet the needs of councils.

Learning from Better connected was extremely well attended. It was a great opportunity at the intervals to meet our customers and new faces to keep up with what was happening in web management for councils. In fact we got along so well with Hammersmith and Fulham and Monmouthshire Councils that both now use Siteimprove tools.

Cerri, Naomi and Natalie at Siteimprove are much looking forward to attending Learning from Better connected 2010 in Manchester.

Siteimprove customer websites top rated in Better Connected 2010

Special congratulations to the 8 out of 11 ‘four star’ councils identified by Socitm Insight that use Siteimprove products.

Socitm Insight’s Better Connected 2010 surveyed 433 council sites so it is a considerable achievement for each council.

We very much value having them as customers and know from their feedback that they enjoy working with us.

The 'four star' councils are:

* Allerdale
* Buckinghamshire
* Cambridgeshire
* East Sussex
* Exeter
* Salford
* South Tyneside
* Worthing

As one council told us ‘Now starts the campaign to be four star rated in 2011’ and we look forward to giving them every support needed to reach their goal.

‘Making Search Work’

Last week I was fortunate enough to attend the ‘Making Search Work’ workshop at the Thistle City Hotel, Barbican, organised by UKeiG. Martin White of Intranet Focus Ltd gave a very insightful workshop on Selecting and implementing web, intranet and enterprise search. We discussed the critical success factors for search including the importance of having good content, building up user trust and having a big enough team to support your search during implementation and beyond.

The competitive nature of the search market and the deceleration in pace of development has meant that technology-wise, many vendors offer an equally efficient search solution. General opinions from this workshop thought that what makes the distinction between searches is ultimately the level of customer service and support that can be offered.

Web Managers Meetings

Over the last few weeks, Siteimprove have been finding out about regional web managers meetings all over the UK. This has been a great way to ensure we are up to date with the key priorities for our customers in a relaxed and informal environment. We were recently invited to Kent Connects’ “Digital Inclusion Group,” regularly attended by the county’s web managers from local authorities and public sector organisations. This was a great opportunity to gain an understanding of the issues being faced in the local web community and strengthen relationships with our existing customers, as well as giving a demonstration of our services to those new prospective customers.

Not content with simply attending meetings, we have also instigated a Hertfordshire web managers meeting after finding out at the ‘Building a perfect council website’ conference in July that there is currently no forum in place for Hertfordshire web managers. With Siteimprove UK based in Bishop’s Stortford, we feel this will be a great way to get to know those locally involved in public sector websites. We look forward to having an informal discussion on issues such as web analytics and accessibility... of course with food provided!

We hope that the Hertfordshire web teams will be able to continue with the monthly meetings to assist each other in web management and share ideas.