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Friday, 4.07.2025
Transforming Government since 2001
The Highways Agency has launched its new website: www.highways.gov.uk. The revamped site, built by RedDot partner CDS, is expected to save the organisation £600,000 in operating costs over a 3 year period, as well as delivering critical real time information on England’s major road conditions including traffic headlines, weather forecasts and email alerts.

The new 10,000 page site replaces a website which although highly popular and well-regarded, required labour intensive and expensive manual coding. Changes had to be outsourced to an agency and often took three days to execute. In a drive to take ownership of the site internally, and increase the speed, relevance and efficiency of its online presence, the Highways Agency reviewed over fifteen CMS systems, with ease of use its key focus.

RedDot’s SmartEdit interface, as well as its browser-based design, proved a popular fit with the organisation and enabled employees to use the system with minimal technical support. Experts such as the in-house weather forecasting team have been given their own page on the site and are able to upload information directly without the help of webmasters. As a result, the site can now provide seven-days-a-week reports on England’s weather and its impact on the country’s highways.

Most importantly, the new site will result in considerable financial savings for the organisation, eliminating its need to work with external content coders.

“We knew that to improve efficiency, the site needed to be managed internally”, explains David Behrens, Online Media Manager for The Highways Agency. “Employees found RedDot’s interface very easy to use. We wanted to allow non-web experts, such as our in house weather forecasting team, to publish material directly to the site with no technical interventions. We literally sent them an email explaining the process and now they are running their own pages with minimal support. Not only has RedDot greatly improved the speed with which information is made available, it will lead to dramatic cost savings for the organisation. We estimate that over the next three years the RedDot implementation will save the Agency £600,000 in operating costs.”

Peter Aylward, Managing Director of RedDot Solutions adds: “The Highways Agency’s story highlights the many benefits that a well run content management system can deliver. The organisation has been able to dramatically improve the way it communicates with its audience and take significant costs out of doing so at the same time.”

Quelle: Publictechnology, 30.03.2006

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