Energy Savings Scheme, NSW Government

Everyone is interested in carbon, and it was with great interest that I embarked on a project working with Stamford Interactive rewriting content for the NSW Government’s Energy Savings Scheme website www.ess.nsw.gov.au.
The brief was to make about 80 pages of content findable, accessible and usable. I made the content scannable, simplified language, wrote links content, and keyword-rich headers. I documented everything in an ESS website style guide – hopefully a handy document for content managers and future writers that work on updating the site.
This project included the rare treat of having the content tested with real users, which gave us some insight into what the target audience thought of what they were reading. We found that we were close, with the exception of needing to chip out a few acronyms – not too onerous a job.
www.ess.gov.au went live in January 2012.