Lewis joined the web team in April 2009, when the unitary council formed. He specialises in both front and back-end development. Away from work he can be found elsewhere on the internet, creating digital landscape artwork.
When we kicked off the ‘recycling and rubbish’ phase of new.shropshire.gov.uk, it was made clear during the analysis stage that a page would be needed to allow people to find out ‘what can I recycle where?’. In this post we go through the bright ideas and failed concepts that led us to our finished page.
Dealing with the death of Umbraco v5
One of the features of the new.shropshire.gov.uk prototype site is the ability to find a service by location – for example, ‘find my nearest’ library. There are two main components to this. The first works out where you are and the second takes the data and provides a list of the three closest libraries to your location. Finding your location Automatically A relatively new feature of most modern browsers is support for the HTML5 geolocation API which allows us to get the geographical location of a user via their device, such as a computer connected to the internet (using network data) or a Global Positioning System (GPS) device (e.g. mobile or tablet). It requires no manual input of address information …
You may recall in May I posted an article on the increase in mobile traffic hitting our web services over the last few months, and as a result we set ourselves a new goal of incorporating responsive designs into future releases of some of those services – i.e. to improve the mobile web experience. Well in late November, we pushed a new responsive design out to the Shropshire Council Newsroom. Scaling the existing design down When I worked on the first version of a responsive design for the newsroom, I took the original fixed-width ‘desktop’ design and scaled it down. At the time it was the quickest and easiest method as there were no design changes planned, but it didn’t …
We’ve seen mobile traffic to shropshire.gov.uk rising steeply recently, so over the coming months we are kicking off a project to make our website work better with mobile and tablet devices. We are currently researching best practice and these are some of the things we have found