The Highlands and Islands Enterprise website www.hie.co.uk, together with its Portree-based web content management system provider Sitekit, scooped the prestigious International Information Award for Innovation in Content Management 2006.
The international awards were announced at a ceremony in the Royal Lancaster Hotel in London on Wednesday, 29 November and hosted by distinguished political journalist John Sergeant. The HIE website faced strong competition from global brands such as HP Learning Solutions and the International Centre of Excellence for Local eDemocracy, The award was presented to HIE's webmaster Ken Porter and Sitekit's managing director Campbell Grant by Mary Peterson, international project manager at the Royal Adelaide Hospital in Australia - a previous winner.
HIE's website won the award in recognition of its innovative approach to information 'tagging' and classification - to help meet international, e-government and other key standards - including the requirements of its Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act publication schemes. An added benefit of doing this systematically is that it helps make the site very visible in internet search engines.
HIE's senior marketing communications executive Ken Porter said: "This is a particularly satisfying recognition because it comes from some of the world's top information management professionals. The competition here was truly international, with entries from Europe, the USA and even Australia.
"It is a great tribute, too, to the whole Sitekit team in Portree. Their imaginative use of internet technology demonstrates that the Highlands and Islands of Scotland is neither an intellectual nor technological backwater. Sitekit's dedicated, people-focused systems have made it very easy for our non-technical web editorial staff to undertake what could otherwise be hugely complicated operations."
Liz Taylor, HIE's information compliance project manager (also author of the books 'Freedom of Information - working towards compliance' and 'Knowledge, Information and the Business Process' ) is one of the online information classification system's main exponents.
Liz commented: "Being able to work hand-in-hand with Sitekit to develop this functionality on our websites has been highly rewarding. We were able to comply very quickly with quite demanding Freedom of Information (FOI) standards when the Act came into being in Scotland from January 2005. The system's flexibility and responsiveness have proved very successful."
Cambell Grant, managing director of Sitekit said: "We are very proud that our work with HIE has been recognised by this prestigious international award. It is testament to Sitekit’s commitment to delivering web excellence and working closely with customers and partners.
"The performance of the HIE site in search engines is particularly impressive. With all of the site’s content visible to search engines and compliant with accessibility standards, Sitekit CMS has ensured that the required public information is both comprehensive and easy to find, whether a visitor is searching for information in a search engine or on the HIE website itself.
"Site statistics reinforce the scale of the site’s performance in distributing information and the benefits to online visitors. In the 12-month period 2005 – 2006 Google indexed the site on average every 20 seconds, resulting in 587,000 direct page referrals.”
