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 …
Find out about the Web Services team & how they work
Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year from Project WIP!!
How meeting new people & situations can be a benefit to your work
I attended a Local DirectGov Really Useful Day on Friday 26th October in Crewe on behalf of the Project WIP team. We were asked to give a presentation on the Customer Journeys and the User Experience work that Shropshire has been doing on new.shropshire.gov.uk. I met some super people from neighbouring councils all with similar problems to what we have and just wanted to say thanks to everyone for being such a great audience. The Project WIP team blog contains many informative posts about what we’ve been up to and the mischief we intend to get into next. If you are interested, please follow us on twitter to ensure you’re kept informed of our regular updates. Design for the customer… or …
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 …
This is a bit late coming, but something I thought was needed. Our colleague Martin Wright, leader of the Web Team, co-conspirator in Project WIP and a close friend to many of us – left Shropshire Council this month to pursue his career further afield. Although we are incredibly sad to see him go, we are also extremely happy for him making the move to further his knowledge in a field that he passionately enjoys. We are also ecstatic because he left behind a rather comfy chair, a red biro, and a photoshop license. All of which were taken even before he left his desk. We are hoping that in a few months time we’ll get Martin back to do a blog post about …