The Welsh Assembly Government (WAG) is responsible for most of the issues of day-to-day concern to the people of Wales, including the economy, health, education, and local government. The Assembly Government’s main website www.wales.gov.uk is the focal point of all public facing internet communications.
In November 2008, to greatly improve the hosting, support, security, functionality and performance of the website infrastructure and applications, the Welsh Assembly Government re-launched web services through a joint venture between Alterian (and their Content
Manager Enterprise solution (CME)) and Verizon Business.
The Welsh Assembly Government deployed Alterian Content Manager as part of the re-platforming of web services to improve communications, hosting, support and software deployment.
“Our initial web challenges were based around speed. We knew that in order to drive online engagement we had to encourage two-way communication on the web. We were, however, inhibited by poor speed to publishcontent, poor site searches and slow web page request returns. In addition, the underlying infrastructure, application and support setup was limiting our ambitions for real engagement with citizens as we couldn’t develop new applications as we needed. In short, whilst our corporate website looked good, it wasn’t able to support our vision of engagement” comments the Head of e-Communications, Welsh Assembly Government.
The launch of the new websites has increased customer satisfaction. Feedback on the speed, consistency and aesthetic appeal of the websites has improved and when asked ‘does the site meet your needs?’ the answer has been a resounding ‘yes’.
The improvement in accessibility scores and compliance with Welsh language policy is a further positive result for the Welsh Assembly website investment. In addition, CME has translated to significant cost savings for the Welsh Assembly.
The Head of e-Communications, reflecting on the implementation, said, “The multi-site functionality of the Alterian CMS means that we have been able to deliver a number of websites from a single shared platform. As a result we’ve seen massive cost reductions in the use of external 3rd party hosting and web services, but most keenly, we no longer have to go outside the organization to buy the design and
technology for new websites.”
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