Sevenoaks DC's website, recognised nationally as a leader amongst local government sites, has relaunched.

Aside from a redesigned look and a restructured navigation, making information easier to find, the site has been rebuilt to meet and exceed the very latest thinking on web accessibility, ensuring that it is easy to use for all sections of the community.

Many websites still do not cater for the needs of disabled people including, for example, those with impaired vision, or who are unable to use a mouse.

Tink Taylor, Director of Ellipsis Media Ltd which built the site for the Council said: "Making a website accessible to everybody is not just a legal requirement, it's plain common sense. There have been huge developments in the techniques used to achieve full accessibility, and it's important to keep abreast of these."

Aside from helping disabled people, fully accessible websites cater for those using different technology - such as palmtop computers - to surf the net. This is a vastly expanding market, and it was thought important to future-proof the site.

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 our dotEditor Content Management System is ideal. This allows managers to keep the site updated themselves - they don't need technical expertise, nor do they need to employ web programmers when changes need to be made.

Tink Taylor said: "Many organisations create a website and then never update it, because it's a lot of trouble, or the costs are too high. This is a ridiculous state of affairs. A content management system changes all this."

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. Again, anybody at the Council can do this - they don't need technical skills.

Staff can use the Payments Manager system to configure payments online. And the site integrates seamlessly with KentConnect  - a countywide system that provides government-standard metadata for websites.

"More and more residents are choosing to use our site to find out information, access services and make payments and on average we have in excess of 10,000 visitors a month", explained Cllr Peter Fleming, the Leader of the Council. "Our new site offers a modern look and is accessible to most users without compromising on its design and information is now much easier to find. We are in the process of developing new on-line services, such as allowing residents to book and pay for their bulky refuse to be collected and even to book an appointment with a dog warden to microchip their dog, which will go live during the year."

www.sevenoaks.gov.uk