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 …
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 …
Yesterday Lorna and I went to Socitm’s Building Perfect Council Websites 2012 conference at the National Motorcycle Museum in Birmingham. We were invited to host one of the breakout discussion groups about new.shropshire.gov.uk and working in the open. We’d like to thank everyone who came to our discussion and hope that you all took something away from it for your own projects. One think we took away yesterday was what Tom Steinbery from My Society said: “Councils used to have a website but now they are a website.” In essesnce your website represents your council, if people see a rundown and old website they see a rundown and old council. We look forward to hearing from you on how you get on …