The Challenge
The brief was daunting from day one. Leadership had decided the website needed a full rebuild: new CMS, new structure, new everything. They created a Website Manager role to make it happen, and Adam stepped into it in 2023.
He and one other person had to do two things at once: dismantle an old, sprawling website and build a new one from scratch. Thousands of pages, much of it out of date, no existing workflow to lean on.
Getting cross-departmental buy-in was essential. Without teams submitting content and engaging with the process, the timeline wasn’t achievable. But buy-in alone doesn’t fix 2,000 pages.
The Solution
Adam had first encountered Silktide at Wirral Council around 2014, working on a similar rebuild. When the same challenge landed at Knowsley, bringing it in again was an easy decision.
Early on, it was about speed. Catching spelling errors, broken links, outdated contact details. The kind of thing that’s easy to miss when you’re moving fast. But the team quickly found uses beyond the basics.
Custom policies became one of the most practical tools. The customer experience team regularly needed to know which pages referenced a specific phone number or email, often one no longer in service. Without Silktide, that meant a manual search that wouldn’t surface every page anyway. With it, Adam could set up a policy, run a scan, and send the report in minutes.
Section-level reporting changed how he talked to departments. Showing the adult social care team their own scores, separate from the wider site, created accountability that was hard to argue with. The numbers made the conversation easier.
The Silktide Academy solved a problem Adam hadn’t fully anticipated. When the council’s contact centre went down and alerts needed to go live fast, he needed people from adjacent teams to be able to step in. He’d been using the Academy to upskill staff from customer experience, people with no web background, and it worked. “It breaks things down quite simply and quite visually,” he said. “It’s a fantastic resource.”
What Changed
Scores have risen from the mid-70s in 2023 to the low 90s today. But the more durable change is how the platform has become part of the daily routine.
“The first thing I do every morning is log into Silktide before I’ve even logged into the website.” For a site approaching 2,000 pages, with changes being made across the organisation, that daily view is how Adam keeps oversight without chasing everything manually.
There’s been a quieter cultural shift too. Content teams have gradually adopted a consistent house style. PDFs are being cut back. People are writing more plainly, with some resistance. Reading age is still a sticking point. Some departments feel policies need to be published verbatim, and that friction hasn’t gone away. But having scores to point to has changed the nature of those conversations.
“It makes more sense for people when you put numbers in front of them. Show them a score going up, and they get it.”
What’s Next
Adam’s target is getting all scores above 95%. Content, specifically reading age, is the main gap.
He’s also been thinking about gamification. The council uses a Power BI managers’ dashboard, and he thinks surfacing Silktide scores there by service team could create enough low-stakes competition to make content quality feel like everyone’s problem, not just his. He hasn’t built it yet, but the idea is clearly rattling around.
Knowsley Borough Council has been a Silktide customer since 2023.