After a (large) number of years working in various IT jobs in the public and private sector, Dale is now a developer for the Web Services team. He helps to build solutions for a range of projects whilst drinking plenty of coffee, although he does switch to decaf in the afternoon. Outside of work he spends quality time with his family, and his spare time with his PS3.
Find out about the Web Services team & how they work
Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year from Project WIP!!
The last few years have brought about a lot of change for Shropshire Council. For us, this has also meant a lot more interaction with other councils and private organisations when collaborating on various projects, or through attending training courses or social events. Whenever we meet a fellow web developer/designer the topic of conversation always moves around to technology, and quite often onto what we use the most in our day jobs. Each time I have this type of conversation I think “I really must get around to writing these down in a blog post” – and now, finally, I have actually put that thought into action… What we use… Notepad++ One of the most commonly-used pieces of software we …
How meeting new people & situations can be a benefit to your work
Yesterday (Monday 10 September) Chris Jones, Louise Tierney and myself attended the Digital Futures 2012 event at the Theatre Severn in Shrewsbury, organised by our colleagues in Shropshire Council’s Communications team. The interesting and entertaining sessions given by the speakers provides a lot of food for thought when it comes to considering how digital and social media is changing the way we interact with the customers that we, as a council, provide services for. You can look for the #digifutures12 hashtag on Twitter to see the tweets from the day, and the discussions that have carried on since then to see how well this event went. Encouragingly, some of the points raised reinforced our own approach when it comes to …
When the decision was made to use Umbraco for new.shropshire.gov.uk it was at an interesting point in the lifecycle of the CMS. The current version at that time (and the one we had based our initial investigations on) was 4.7.1, but a newer, more refined version (Umbraco 5) was in beta, and would be released well within the timescales of our project. Being the adventurous types (and the fact that the majority of us had just completed ASP.NET 4 and C# training making it an easier learning curve for us), we opted to develop the prototype site using Umbraco 5. The main draw of this version was the advantage of having a more refined behind-the-scenes architecture and a streamlined templating …
For those following our recent posts, you will have noticed a lot of chatter about the work behind new.shropshire.gov.uk. This has covered pretty much all the stages of the project, from the initial announcement of the prototype site right up to the launch, but one thing we haven’t covered is our choice of CMS – Umbraco. Over the past few years we have been looking for a replacement for our own in-house developed CMS, hoping to find something that can be easily adapted to suit the ever-changing requirements of our customers. We’ve investigated a number of commercial systems, but have repeatedly found that they either come with restrictive development frameworks, or we have fallen foul of the limited budget we …
Today (28 June 2011) we released v5.0.4 of our website. To the casual visitor, this won’t mean much, but for us this release brings about more improvements for the shropshire.gov.uk website & our CMS. I won’t bore you with the CMS changes (but I will say that what we have received the comment “Love it , Love it, Love it!!” during the testing phase), so for this post we will focus on the improvements to the website itself. What’s new? Following feedback about content that appears to be out of date, we’ve added a new notification that will appear on pages that are currently being reviewed. This alert will also allow you to give feedback to our Web Manager to help …
As mentioned in a previous post, many websites claim to meet the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), but these claims are often based on automated tests, and couldn’t be further from the truth. Automated tests are useful but limited and should only be used as part of a wider range of tests incorporating a number of different tools and methods – including user testing. However, in some circumstances you may not have the time or resources for such in-depth user testing, or have been brought in at last-minute only to find that the site is “almost live”. In those cases you are going to have to get stuck in and test it yourself… but where do you start? In …
When you are creating a website, it is easy to get caught up in designing sharp-looking features with a whole plethora of widgets and gadgets to keep your audience entertained. Yes, it does look amazing, and yes, it does everything you want it to do, but the one question remains – can everyone use it?