Surrey Police asked us to rebuild and redesign its website. With more than 2,500 pages of content, this was a large and genuinely complex estate, serving audiences with incredibly diverse needs. Someone reporting a crime or searching for urgent advice arrives in a very different frame of mind to a local resident checking on their neighbourhood team, a journalist chasing a statement, or a prospective officer looking for a job. The site had to work for all of them at once.

Two demands sat at the heart of the brief. The public needed a site that was straightforward and accessible to navigate, with the most critical services reachable in moments rather than clicks. The force needed a site it could keep current itself, not only through a small central web team but through contributors right across the organisation, including neighbourhood officers working out in local communities.

Meeting both of these needs at the scale of a 2,500-page site, and under the accessibility obligations that apply to a public body, was the real challenge.

We began with the people the site exists to serve. Through user experience work and a reshaped information architecture, we designed an intuitive, accessible interface built around what the public most need from their police force. Clear routes to report a crime online, find advice and locate a local policing team sit right at the front of the experience, supported by a ‘Popular right now’ panel, latest news, missing people and witness appeals. Emergency and non-emergency contact routes are signposted consistently throughout, so no visitor is ever left searching for how to make contact.

Behind the interface, we implemented a powerful content management system with tiered permission levels for editors and contributors across the force. That governance model is what makes a site of this size sustainable: central teams retain control and consistency, while trained contributors in local teams can publish the content closest to their communities. Integrations with social media, Google Maps and Twitter keep that content live and local, allowing neighbourhood officers to update the website while they are on the beat rather than waiting on a central queue.

With the core experience in place, we optimised the site for mobile, reflecting how most of the public now reach a public service, and then rolled the platform out for Sussex Police on shared infrastructure. Reusing the same foundation gave the second force a proven, accessible platform quickly and kept both forces on a single, efficient technical footing. 

Surrey Police gained a modern, accessible platform that the whole force can keep up to date, with the services the public need most, online crime reporting, witness appeals, missing people and local policing team information, brought to the fore. A site that had been large and hard to navigate became a clear, service-led experience for the public and a manageable, governable one for the force.

The strength of the relationship and the quality of the result led Sussex Police to ask us to deliver the same for them, so the two neighbouring forces could share a single infrastructure. That extension is itself a measure of success: a platform proven with one force and trusted enough to be adopted by another.