Redweb designed website wins Sitecore 'Site of the Year'

The Redweb designed website for The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) has won the Sitecore Site of the Year (www.bis.gov.uk). The global award is open to any website run on the Sitecore CMS platform.

Redweb were responsible for the design, information architecture and UX elements of the website. Work also included user research and usability testing to validate the solution prior to build. The implementation and CMS integration was undertaken by Eduserv (www.eduserv.org.uk) who, like Redweb, are a prominent Sitecore partner.

BIS was created in June 2009 by merging the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (BERR) with the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills (DIUS). The new organisation has a much broader constituency and, as a result of the merger, faced a number of business challenges including how best to communicate to all audiences via one website. BIS worked with Redweb and Eduserv to build a new site that was perfectly placed to deliver on its complex business requirements.

'The new website has been really quick to implement and has given us a far more professional online presence', said Neil Williams, head of digital communications, BIS. 'The Sitecore CMS platform will save BIS £2.5 million in relation to our previous CMS implementation. In addition, by converging partner sites onto the shared platform, has the potential to save another £700k a year in hosting and maintenance costs across the BIS family.'

Paul Seys, Head of UX at Redweb, is delighted that the BIS site has received such recognition. He stated 'The deadlines were tight but we stuck to our process of user-centred design and are delighted with the results. We wanted to produce a design and information architecture that met the needs of the users. The feedback we received during the stakeholder workshops really shaped our thinking on the final design'.