St Albans delivers an accessible and fluid customer journey with Acquia Optimize.
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.
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.
For St Albans, delivering a website that is accessible and enjoyable for its citizens to use involves a number of considerations and challenges:
However, prior to Acquia Optimize, 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.
Acquia Optimize’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 Acquia Optimize 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, Acquia Optimize’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.
Since adopting the Acquia Optimize 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 Acquia Optimize has been hugely helpful in proactively alerting Staples and his team to relevant changes in legislation and associated accessibility standards.
The value of the Acquia Optimize 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. Acquia Optimize’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.
