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 …
Dealing with the death of Umbraco v5
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 …
It’s gone very quiet since we released the prototype of new.shropshre.gov.uk but rest assured we’ve been very busy. As well as finishing some missing functionality, responding to feedback and fixing some pesky bugs we’re planning the next stages of the project and creating a repeatable process for the rest of shropshire.gov.uk.
We’d like to invite you to try out what we’re calling ‘version 1’ of new.shropshire.gov.uk. We have completed around 70% of the site and will be adding loads of new features over the coming days and weeks.
In preparation for the launch of new.shropshire.gov.uk we’ve set ourselves up with a brand new Facebook profile, you can send us all your feedback and ideas on there now too.
Over the next couple of months we will create a new ‘prototype’ version of Shropshire.gov.uk’s library pages that will focus on customer needs rather than the organisation’s to make it quick and easy for our customers to find what they are looking for.
We are happy to announce our bus timetables system is now live. Although we have designed the system to work for a wide range of devices we took a chance with this project to try out some new technologies which I wanted to talk about briefly here.
We had over 1000 unique visits to the new buses system – thanks to everybody who took time to try it out. We’ve had bucket loads of feedback and I’d love to be able to address every one individually but there were just too many, instead I have tried to summarise them in this post.
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 …