Sevenoaks District Council

We've been providing Sevenoaks District Council with web design and development services since 2000. As well as a number of smaller projects, we've carried out three complete redesigns and redevelopments of their main site, each reflecting the Council's commitment to and achievement in providing more services online. Our recent involvement has seen the site rebuilt to meet and exceed the very latest thinking on web accessibility.

A local government website needs to meet two key considerations. It needs to be responsive to the needs of the community, providing two way communications between council and public. And it needs to be flexible enough to allow information about an amazingly diverse range of services to be managed sensibly. Several hundred different people might be involved in producing or authorising content for a local authority site. That's why dotEditor is ideal.

Along with the standard dotEditor core, Sevenoaks uses the form builder plugin to easily create surveys and feedback forms to give the public their say on what the Council is doing. Responses go into an automatically-generated database, and the data can be accessed via an administration area or exported for offline processing. Anybody at the Council can do this - they don't need technical skills.

Staff can use the Payments Manager system to configure payments online. Again, they don’t need technical expertise. And the site integrates seamlessly with KentConnect - a countywide system that provides government-standard metadata for websites.

Sevenoaks's investment has been recognised - the site was named as one of the country's 20 most improved local authority websites by SOCITM in their highly influential 'Better Connected' survey.