Redhouse Lane makes it Crystal clear
The Business & Partners section of Transport for London’s website has gained the coveted Crystal Mark from the Plain English Campaign.
It joins an elite club of only about one in ten websites which have met the Campaign’s demanding standards at the first time of asking.
A team from Redhouse Lane has been working with TfL editors and information architects since early February to get the section - which has up to seven million hits a month - up to scratch.
“tfl.gov.uk won the Webby People’s Voice Award for Best Government Website last year, so it's clearly doing something right,” says Richard Lomax, editorial director at Redhouse Lane, who led the team. “But the site lacked a consistent tone of voice. And the impersonal and, at times, bureaucratic language undermined TfL’s customer-focused brand values.”
Redhouse Lane’s team of six web editors audited the main Business & Partners area of the site ; ran workshops to establish the tone of voice and engage content owners; and edited pages on the Red Dot content management system, rewriting and restructuring content and improving accessibility.
The Crystal Mark will act as a quality benchmark to be applied across all of TfL’s online communication. Editors, information architects and stakeholders have been trained as champions of new work practices, with clear tone of voice and style guides, and a ‘roadmap’ for maintaining the Mark.
“Content owners are encouraged to ‘think audience’, and consider the constraints and possibilities of the online medium, when communicating,” says Lomax.
The Plain English campaign hits the headlines every year with its Golden Bull awards, for the ‘best’ examples of gobbledegook.
Previous winners have included the BAA for a sign at Gatwick Airport which read ‘Passenger shoe repatriation area only’; and Germaine Greer, who told bemused Guardian readers that: ‘The first attribute of the art object is that it creates a discontinuity between itself and the unsynthesised manifold.’ She was not amused.
