It has been a year now since we first launched the Avon and Somerset police website on 1st February 2015.
In this post I want to reflect on how far we have come.
It seems to have passed quickly but I am still very proud of what we have achieved.
Traffic
Since launch the site has served over 1,5 million users. Whilst this figure sounds impressive, what is important to us is that the site has delivered a quality service to those people.
User satisfaction
A recent survey of the public who have used our website showed that 94% of them said they found it really easy to use and found what they wanted.
When we launched our benchmark success rate was 80%. So we have actually increased the effectiveness of the site over the last year from our starting rate.
Content Management
That’s great news and shows the effort we have put in over the last year to protect content and keep it aligned with the initial public consultation work has paid off.
There is real value to be gained from constant content review. We continue challenging new content requests to ensure they are hitting user objectives.
Recently our new content managers have been speaking to different parts of the organisation to see how things are working for them as recipients.
In particular our call centre staff who process our inbound crime reports and our intel unit who receive the intelligence tip offs through the site.
I’m keen to keep this as a regular occurrence as we received some useful feedback as well as some positive highlights about the quality and usefulness of the information received.
Web Traffic Spikes
During the last week or so we have received some significant traffic to the tragic murder of Becky watts. Having received more visitors in a single day than we usually receive in a month, it was a stark reminder of the importance of the online service both for the public seeking information and for our organisation as a channel to appeal for the public’s help.
Is Google analytics accurate?
We estimate our Google Analytics is under reporting about 30% of our actual traffic now due to modern browsers having “do not track” turned on as default.
What are we working on?
In terms of what we are working on next, the team are making great progress on our integrated community alerting system as an extension of the main website.
This will bring telephone voice and SMS functionality in addition to our existing e-mail options.
This will keep things simple for the public as we migrate our Neighbourhood Watch community information and other community groups from old legacy systems, and will mean our officers and staff only have to use one system for all their community contacts instead of three.