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
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 …
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 …
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 …
When the decision was made to use Umbraco for new.shropshire.gov.uk it was at an interesting point in the lifecycle of the CMS. The current version at that time (and the one we had based our initial investigations on) was 4.7.1, but a newer, more refined version (Umbraco 5) was in beta, and would be released well within the timescales of our project. Being the adventurous types (and the fact that the majority of us had just completed ASP.NET 4 and C# training making it an easier learning curve for us), we opted to develop the prototype site using Umbraco 5. The main draw of this version was the advantage of having a more refined behind-the-scenes architecture and a streamlined templating …
For those following our recent posts, you will have noticed a lot of chatter about the work behind new.shropshire.gov.uk. This has covered pretty much all the stages of the project, from the initial announcement of the prototype site right up to the launch, but one thing we haven’t covered is our choice of CMS – Umbraco. Over the past few years we have been looking for a replacement for our own in-house developed CMS, hoping to find something that can be easily adapted to suit the ever-changing requirements of our customers. We’ve investigated a number of commercial systems, but have repeatedly found that they either come with restrictive development frameworks, or we have fallen foul of the limited budget we …