On Wednesday 24th April I attended the Socitm Spring Conference at The Royal College of Surgeons and wanted to share my thoughts and experiences with you all. On the morning of the event, I woke up in London, a significant change to rural Shropshire and wondered what the day ahead may have in store. It was apparent from the Chair’s introduction that this was going to be a day full of interesting discussions, debates and ideas. The event got off to a great start with a presentation on Digital Insights by Martin Ferguson (Director of Policy and Research at Socitm) which was followed by a very entertaining presentation by Carl Haggerty from Devon County Council who talked about being open …
In case you’ve been wondering what we’ve been up to recently on new.shropshire.gov.uk here’s a quick update for you about our work with Building Control, with a few words from the team themselves. Here’s what Mike Seager, Building Control Surveyor, had to say about working with us: “The Building Control department of Shropshire Council sits within the Development Control section. We were informed a while ago that our web pages were to be transferred to a new web system from the old Lotus Notes CMS, this seemed pretty good to us. The new system, built using Umbraco, allows for a more functional website and the new format is more in keeping with current website design. We haven’t gone live to date, …
Earlier this week we had our neighbours from Birmingham City Council pay us a visit. It gave them a chance to find out about Umbraco – our new Content Management System (CMS) – and how we were getting along with it, and also give them a deeper insight into Project WIP. The visit was interesting for us all here. Primarily it brought us up to speed on Birmingham City Council’s plans for their website, and it also highlighted the common goals/issues we both face when trying to determine our target audience whilst also bringing about a culture shift internally to make our services realise how useful our websites are for them. Simon Gray, Corporate Web / Self-Service Development Officer, from …
We were recently invited by Shropgeek to give a presentation at their first ever Rebellion event at The Alb in Shrewsbury on Thursday 21st February 2013 (sorry, we know the post is a little late). The Rebellion event gave us an excellent opportunity to show people the thought process behind the development of new.shropshire.gov.uk – in particular Customer Journeys and the User Experience work that we are carrying out for each new service we add. We explained how Project WIP formed, who makes up Project WIP, how we chose our new Content Managment System (CMS), how we worked closely with service areas to redesign their online presence, and how and why we made the design choices we did. (Left to right ) Rob May …
Here’s our presentation for the ‘Really Useful Day’ event in Huddersfield
Find out about the Web Services team & how they work
Stuck for filler content for your mockups? Look here…!
Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year from Project WIP!!
You’re probably aware that we’ve been busy working away on new.shropshire.gov.uk – to be honest it’s all we’ve been harping on about, how could you not know? As part of the new.shropshire.gov.uk project we’ve been re-engineering the whole look, feel and experience. Now, we think we’ve done a fairly good job, but, as the saying goes, “the proof is in the pudding”. So, armed with an iPad we visited The Shrewsbury Coffeehouse and sat with some friendly local residents who were kind enough – in between eating their cake and drinking their coffee – to carry out some testing on new.shropshire.gov.uk. First we asked our testers to use the site freely and to give general feedback. We then asked them …
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 …