Pendle Borough Council launched their new website, powered by Jadu CMS in just six weeks.
Having deployed a website with a content management system that fell short of meeting government and accessibility standards, Pendle Borough Council (PBC) chose to 'switch' their recently launched website for a CMS that could be truly devolved around the council.
After looking at Jadu CMS implementations at Ribble Valley BC and Kettering BC, Pendle BC selected Jadu CMS, with the knowledge that compliance and accessibility would come 'out of the box'.
Derek Beesley, ICT Services Manager said that Pendle "Selected the Jadu CMS after having looked at a neighbouring authority - what has delighted me about the system is that we have now finally got a CMS that our web champions [content managers] can use that complies with all the standards that we were worrying about and struggling with and it also allows us to manage our BVPI 157 targets."
Web Administrator Kathryn Stackhouse described the fast-tracked implementation as 'painless'.
"The website that we had before we implemented Jadu had good information on it, but it didn't have the personalisation features that Jadu has, which makes the new [Jadu] website overall a much more personalised experience."
From poor to good - making pendle.gov.uk accessible
Jadu CMS for is designed to output clean, accessible content.
SiteMorse, a commercial website testing organisation used by SOCITM for the 'Better Connected' survey, rated the previous pendle.gov.uk at number 267 out of 464 local authority websites tested during February 2005. After the Jadu CMS went live in March 2005 (one month later), SiteMorse rated pendle.gov.uk at number 21 - a massive leap of 197 places, putting pendle.gov.uk in the top 5% in the country.
Other Jadu CMS sites have done equally well - Ribble Valley Borough Council, for example, went from 'unreachable' (unlisted) to number 20 and Rugby Borough Council, from number 244 to number 38.