Content principles

Last updated: 15 May 2025

Our content principles guide the way we plan, create, implement, and govern content.

Content must have a clear purpose

Content must exist for a valid reason such as meeting a:

• user need
• business goal
• legal requirement.

We’ll pass all content requests through our proposition.

Content must start with the user

We’ll create content that meets user needs so that people can do the thing they want to, quickly and easily.

This means we’ll start by finding out:

• who the user is
• what the user needs to know
• the problems we’re trying to solve
• the outcome the user is trying to get to.

We do not want to hide what people genuinely need to know with lots of stuff they don’t.

Our content must not be based around our organisational structure. Users do not understand the different teams we have or how we work internally, and they shouldn’t have to.

Content is based on evidence

User needs will be backed up with evidence.

We will:

• review existing data (for example, analytics, search logs, telephony volumes, user feedback)
• conduct user research (for examples, interviews, observations, card sorts)
• research what is working for other local authorities or public sector organisations.

We write for everyone

Our audience could be anyone living or working in Medway, or people who want to visit.

Our users have different reading abilities and access needs. They use a range of devices and assistive technologies to find and use information online.

This means we must write content in a way that most people understand.

We will:

• write for the web
• use our style guide
• follow our accessibility policy
• choose HTML webpages over documents
• create accessible documents.

We collaborate

We collaborate with staff outside of our team or department, such as subject matter experts, to produce good content.

We work closely with other design colleagues to create seamless user journeys and meet best practice standards. This includes business analysts, data analysts, service designers, product designers and developers.

We’ll consider the best channels for our content based on the user and their goal. Not everything has to live on the medway.gov.uk website.

We measure, learn and iterate

We monitor content to know if it’s still meeting its objectives and to continually improve.

We will:

• regularly audit content to see how users are interacting with it and identify problems 
• update content based on evidence
• archive content when it’s no longer needed or useful.