Mitchell Shire Council

Head north along the Hume Highway out of Melbourne and you will drive through Mitchell Shire – a local government area that is growing quickly because of its proximity to the city.

In mid 2018 Happy Content was invited to help with the redesign of the Mitchell website, including an IA rethink, new designs and content management system, and revised content.

As the project content partner we reviewed content to understand what was there, and what sort of shape it was in. We mapped content into the revised IA, and wrote an organisation-specific style guide.

Rewriting content

We worked with topic experts to write 280 HTML pages of user-centric, accessible content. To work on more complex topics we organised paired writing sessions with managers. For other pages we rewrote content into Plain English and into the agreed voice and style, to be checked by the expert. The result was accurate, well-written content. The process helped change the stakeholders’ focus from internal business deliverables to user-centric content outcomes.

Writing for the web training

To help staff transition to managing their content in the newly redesigned website, we ran a series of writing for the Mitchel website training sessions. We delivered 5 workshops on-site for 30+ authors. Workshop content included:

• the new Mitchell content style guide explained
• how people read on the web 
• why we write the way we do, using real content examples.