Irish Water Safety

For many organisations measuring the effectiveness of a website can be a hit and miss affair. For Irish Water Safety (IWS), driving traffic to their website www.iws.ie has become the focus of all water safety advertising in Ireland and the only long-term measurement of effectiveness that counts is a reduction in drowning incidents. Their work relates strongly to the health and safety of tourists as well as Irish people.

Visitors to the website must be able to access important safety information quickly and easily, identify swimming and lifesaving lessons available in their area and, as a semi-state organisation the site must be fully accessible to people with special needs.

IWS were ‘early adopters’ of the web and the site had been constructed as a means for members to access information and resources, to support an online certification process for courses and other functionality. There is a content management system which has enabled IWS to manage their own site, but the site itself has grown very large and needed to be comprehensively reviewed.
The challenge now is to turn the site into an effective communications vehicle for the general public as well as retaining membership information and tools within a login area.

The first step was a full website accessibility and usability Audit, using 2020 Strategies’ internationally accredited Audit developed for WTO Web Watch.

From the Audit a list of recommended action included:

• Taking steps to make the site fully accessible as defined by the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) and Irish Government regulations for public sector sites
• Re-organising the vital safety information so it was easier to find
• Reviewing the navigation used within the site to make it consistent and easier for visitors to find important content
• Correcting technical problems like broken links and large graphics that made pages slow to download

IWS then commissioned a series of staff workshops run by Maggie Bowen of 2020 Strategies, to help implement the changes. A new parallel site was built in the SitesToGo system as a model for re-organising the extensive content on the site. This enabled stakeholders to comment on the changes before they were transferred to the live website.

Roger Sweeney, Marketing Director of Irish Water Safety says: “ Our website had grown rapidly and we needed an outside view. The 2020 Strategies Audit used measurable criteria that we could easily understand and gave us a list of recommendations in plain English. The workshops took us a stage further and we are now implementing the resulting programme throughout the site, our staff are now better trained in best practice and how to publish good website content that can be easily found"

Work will now commence to transfer the changes to a live site ready for the 2006 season.