Website migration and ROI of Silktide: NHS RCHT

Question:
Could you please tell us about your role?

Ian:
Yeah so my name’s Ian Nicholls. My job role at the Royal Cornwall Hospitals Trust is E-health Transformation Manager. I work in our shared I.T. Service, Cornwall I.T. Services. And one of my roles is to manage our web team, and our web team provide the website and intranet sites for the Royal Cornwall Hospitals and also the Cornwall ICB as well as building and providing websites for a couple of other external organizations.

Question:
What’s the size of your web estate?

Ian:
So I think in total we manage six external websites and two intranets and a couple of document libraries as well, all of which we use Silktide for.

Question:
Why did you start using Silktide?

Ian:
So we’ve been using Silktide for a few years now and it was born out of a need to find a tool to continually monitor the accessibility and other issues with our websites.

We had an audit done, a static WCAG audit, and identified some issues with the website and that was great in figuring out what was wrong with the website and what we needed to change to make it more accessible. However, the website just isn’t static and we really needed a way of keeping track of changes as well as any impacts. And our websites use things such as plugins which can change and update and themselves have an impact on the WCAG accessibility of all the sites.

So that’s when we found Silktide. We use it to continually monitor for issues on the website and to allow staff to quickly find issues and rectify them. And for me as a manager, it’s very useful to give overall assurance about the current status of our website and whether we need to do any particular pieces of work to it.

But it’s also been a really useful tool for the team to see the impact of the work that they’ve been doing to improve the website’s accessibility, in it allows us to track on an ongoing basis the quality and the accessibility of the site.

Question:
How does Silktide Analytics benefit you?

Ian:
We’ve recently rebuilt the website, for the newly formed ICB in Cornwall, and we’ve applied Silktide Analytics to that. We use that really to demonstrate which areas of the website are getting the most traffic, how people are arriving at the website and any points of frustration or whatever the users find with it. We then use that to feedback to the communication staff at the ICB about how and what people are looking for on the website to allow them to better adjust the content and the campaigns that they run to drive traffic to the website and hopefully channel shift and improve the way people access health services in Cornwall.

It’s fantastic in that you can give it to somebody that is not trained in web or understand anything in any detail about analytics, provide them with access and they can just get in there, click around and quickly understand and get a picture of the use of our website, who’s using it, and how they’re using it.

And we’ve also found it useful to identify areas of frustration that users find. And an example of that would be that we built the website and there was a picture which had a phone number and an email address in that picture and what Silktide quickly pointed out to us is that people were clicking on that expecting the usual use case, that that would then open a link or they would be able then to go and phone that number. It was missed when we built the website, so that was quickly highlighted that it was an issue. We changed the picture. We put in the links that people would expect to remove that. And without the Silktide analytics, we may never have realized that that was even an issue.

Question:
What does Silktide provide to your workflow?

Ian:
One of the things that the web team is currently heavily involved in is the rebuild of the Royal Cornwall Hospital Trust’s website.

The existing website is built on an old theme. It’s starting to look a bit dated and it doesn’t work as efficiently as we’d like it to do. So we’re rebuilding it now using the NHS theme, which we have experience with using for the ICB websites and other websites that we’ve built. And Silktide plays a really important part in that, in that it helps us understand the new website, how it all hangs together, how it flows, identifies quickly any issues we are causing with it in the new build with accessibility so we can design them out and make sure that overall the theme is accessibility compliant from the start.

What we really didn’t want to do was get to the completion of the website and then find that we’ve built in a load of problems that we then had to go back to and sort out. It was really a case of wanting to build it effectively along the way and the team use and refer to Silktide for that build on a daily basis to make sure that that happens.

I’m regularly called upon to provide information to the organization only compliance with accessibility of our websites and without having Silktide to do that, I really wouldn’t have found it anywhere near as easy to do it. It’d have to be done manually, which would be time consuming and expensive. Silktide regularly points out things that have changed in the website and the accessibility problems that we didn’t previously have now arisen, and it allows me to provide information on those incidences, what we’ve done about it, and what the new accessibility rating of the website is.

Plus, it also allows us to identify other issues with the website where content is provided, if it is difficult for people to understand, because it’s got a high reading age, or if there’s spelling mistakes and things like that, all of which we probably wouldn’t be able to do without Silktide. We would have to go through a much more rigorous vetting process before it went live. So, yeah, it’s a day-to-day tool that the team rely upon for the ongoing management of the website.

Question:
Is Silktide worth the investment?

Ian:
I mean, the investment in Silktide that we made saves us a huge amount of time ensuring the quality of our websites, but actually because of our focus on accessibility and how Silktide has allowed us to do that, it has allowed us to make a case for providing high quality websites for other organizations as well.

So people recognize the quality of our websites as they are at the minute, all of which we wouldn’t be able to do without Silktide. And we have taken on additional work because of that. So there has been some income generation as a result of the use of the system. If we didn’t have Silktide, we would almost certainly have to reconsider how we provide ongoing assurance of the quality of accessibility of our websites, and that would almost certainly require additional manpower to do so.