As the role of LEPs has evolved over the last two years, it became clear that our old website had served its time and could no longer effectively get across all of what we do. So we have been pleased to work with Hull-based Retail Centred over the last few months to develop this new website, built on the flexible WordPress platform.
Some of the key changes and additions in this first phase of work are:
- Tagging our content against the three key ambitions agreed by our Board, and developing portal pages for business, skills and infrastructure (a work in progress). We hope this will make it much easier to find out what we are doing across these areas.
- Re-doing our board pages to make it easier to find out who is involved, what they do and what decisions they have made. We are gradually adding more information to this section. We have always published our main board minutes, we now publish our sub-board and some other minutes, and we will shortly begin publishing agendas and papers for our boards as well.
- Checking and re-working the information on our key business support programmes to make sure it is as simple as possible.
- We’ve moved some content off to our other websites so we can focus our main one on what we do:
- We’ve moved over information about investing in the Humber to thehumber.com, the dedicated inward investment portal we are working on with the Bondholder Scheme and Humber local authorities (currently in beta).
- We’ve moved over information about other organisations’ business support services to our Business Growth Hub website (also currently in beta), the one-stop-stop for finding out about what is on offer to businesses in the Humber area. We’ll be adding much more to this in the coming months, and refreshing the design in places.
- We’ve gathered and uploaded case studies on businesses which have been supported by some of our programmes. More of these, and case studies on other areas of our work, to come in the future.
- We’ve started this blog! Our staff team and – we hope – some of our board/working group members will be contributing posts as we get going, giving a more in-depth insight into what happens through the LEP. (It’s a new thing for us and we’ll be looking closely at how others do this well for lessons, including some of the civil service bloggers on Gov.uk – GDS’s work has provided some inspiration for what we want to achieve with this website.) We hope you find it interesting, and if there are any particular areas you would like to hear about please let us know.
In the coming months, we will also be adding much more detail about the projects and programmes we are supporting, where they are up to and what they are achieving, as well as our Annual Review.
The website is a work in progress, but we hope you will agree that what we have so far is a step forward from our old site. We’d love to hear your feedback through our contact page on what works and what doesn’t, and what more you would like to see.