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, …
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
Stuck for filler content for your mockups? Look here…!
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 …
We’ve recently completed development work on the Libraries and Recycling and Rubbish pages, so, “what’s next” you ask? We’re moving onto Planning Services (cue scary music). But you’ll be pleased to hear we’re off to a good start. We hosted a workshop the other week with the good people of planning to help figure out the content we will need. It’s important to get the right mix in these User Experience (UX) workshops. You need people from all different areas, people who receive the planning applications, people who validate them, people who give the pre-application advice and people who have the power to make difficult decisions. We were lucky enough to have enthusiastic and engaged people along with the Planning …
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.
I am going to start this post with a couple of questions: Why do you visit council planning web pages? Have you already visited ours? The reason for these questions is that I have been tasked with finding out what our customers really want, with the aim of improving our user experience for our new Planning web pages. “Easy” you say, “they surely come to you for planning related queries?”. Yes they do but what is a ‘planning related query’? It could be anything – “I want to build a conservatory”, “I want to build an extension”, “How can I comment on a planning application”, “I want to erect a fence”. So, yes you are right to think that they’re …
Firstly apologies for being a little quiet about new.shropshire.gov.uk but you may have read on previous posts we’ve had a few ‘hiccups’ with Umbraco, but we’re back on track. We mentioned previously that we’d be looking at the Waste service area next, and have since carried out our preliminarily research by holding a kick off meeting with elected members from the Waste team so we could find out what their aims are and ultimately what their customers want. We presented our findings to them, backed up with research from a few days spent trawling through Google Analytics, and to their surprise there were a few unexpected outcomes. Pages they didn’t think would be so popular were, and there were several unexpected search …