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 by default, digital by design. I specifically liked the fact that Carl seemed to share my frustrations with the phrase ‘Digital by default’.

I do have a special thanks for Carl because it is down to him that I now really understand what it feels like for a customer when you change things “Disrupt yourself, see how it feels for your customers” . For those of you that attended I thought I’d actually lost my watch when I swapped it to the other wrist!

Before lunch, Tom Loosemore, Deputy Director at the Government Digital Service gave a thought provoking presentation about the Governments Digital Strategy.

To my surprise, I looked up at the screen and saw new.shropshire.gov.uk in front of me.

I instantly starting thinking “Oh dear, let’s hope that this is being used as an example of best practice not worst!”. I have been to so many events in the past where the speaker has said “Is there anyone in the room from x authority… no,  well that makes it easier” and then ripped their website apart.  A moment of pure panic for me, however, I should have known better and had confidence in our approach to new.shropshire and indeed Project WIP.

Tom said:

“Shropshire’s use of Open Source solutions is one of the best I’ve seen, it has realised huge savings at little cost, and I encourage all authorities to start considering this technology as a serious option. I am also impressed by Shropshire’s openness and the use of Project WIP as a way of involving customers and the rest of the web community in the development of their new site. “

The praise given by Tom was gratefully received by me and colleagues who were in attendance and shared by the team back at base. This came at just the right time as we start reviewing the last 12 months and our next steps. Tom’s last slide about Shropshire simply said ‘wow’ – it is very rare that I blush but on this occasion I was glowing!

Throughout the course of the day, I also attended 2 discussion tables:

1. Keeping up with accessibility – An hour well spent with Dan Jellinek sharing useful information and tips on how to ensure that digital media is accessible to all.

2. Building a digital strategy – Conversations around having an independent digital strategy and where ownership of that strategy should sit provoked lots of differing opinion. My thinking is that we spend a lot of time in local government writing strategies and although I wouldn’t go as far as to say that I don’t think they are important, do they really have any bearing on real culture change in an organisation? I have seen them used time and time again as a stick to beat services with but with little or no effect. In my experience, one size does not fit so why should one strategy be suitable for all? Unfortunately, my time at the table was cut short as I had to leave early to get my train (it may have been for the best as once I get started on this subject it is hard to stop me!)

I had a fantastic day and just when I thought that my trip to London couldn’t get any better, Matthew Tooke from East Sussex came to speak to me about his interest in the work we are doing and I couldn’t wait to follow up our conversation with an invitation to Shropshire to meet the Project WIP team!

If anyone else would like to come and talk to us about new.shropshire, Project WIP, Umbraco or just to throw a few ideas around, we would love to hear from you!

Overall, a great trip where I learnt a lot, met some great people and had a lot of fun.

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, however the Web Services team supporting us have gone through a process with the Building Control team which helped them to gain an understanding of what the Building Control function is and how we need the web profile to support our marketing and promotion.

The Building Control function operates in an open marketplace thus we need to attain a high level presence on the web. The Web Services team have been extremely helpful and supportive throughout this process.”

We really enjoyed our workshops with the Building Control team, it was great to have a wide variety of team members giving input and really helped us to understand how they worked and what they needed. We came away with a lot of material to work with…

Now that our side of the development is complete, the new site has been handed over to the team for them to start working on the content. It’s a really big change from their old site (as you can tell from the print screens) but we think they’re happy with how it has turned out!

Before:

After:

Ian Maddox Building Control Manager says

Our site needed to be more than simply just a web site, it also needed to meet our needs as a marketing tool.

The Web Services team took on board our specific business needs, and gave our service area a feeling of individuality.

We are extremely pleased with the end result. We’ve finally got a web site that we can work with and develop to meet our specific needs. From start to finish it was a pleasurable experience working alongside the Web Services team’.

Keep an eye on this blog for further updates about the Building Control service & all the other services we are developing for new.shropshire.gov.uk

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 Birmingham City Council says:

“Building on connections we’ve made at UKGovCamps, LocalGovCamps, and the wider local government social media community we went to see our friends and colleagues from Coventry City Council and Shropshire Council, learning from their experiences of how their content management systems – Jadu and Umbraco respectively – help them in their work, issues that have arisen from fast migration plans, and specifically in the case of Shropshire learning from their own Project WIP activity, which was in fact the inspiration for us in creating this very project ourselves!
“We’re immensely grateful to Alison from Coventry and Lorna, Louise, Mark, Dale, and Lewis from Shropshire for the amount of time they let us spend with them during their own busy days, and the information we got from them has been invaluable as we move forward in our own work.”

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 (Photographer), Kirsty Burgoine (Shropgeek organiser), Louise Tierney (Project WIP member) Chris Jones (Project WIP member). Photo taken by JJ Mellors Photography.

It was really inspiring to see so many people there and it was great to get a chance to mingle afterwards too.

We’d like to thank everyone who attended the event and we hope you were all able to take something away from it.

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 and be sure to sign up to become one of our testers.

Design for the customer…

not the service area.

Scott Alford had kindly asked us to give a presentation detailing some of the Customer Journeys and the User Experience work that we had been doing for new.shropshire.gov.uk, with a particular focus on Planning.

We started work with the Planning service area last year, looking at how we could best present the information to the users in a way they wanted and understood. To achieve this we looked at their statistics and tried to get inside the customer’s head, thinking about the related tasks they may need. Take a look at our previous blog post about the workshops we held with the Planning staff for more information on how we re-designed their webpages.

We have handed Planning over to the Corporate Content Team so they can work closely with them on structuring & re-writing their content (along with Building Control last week). So keep your eyes peeled for the launch on new.shropshire.gov.uk .

We’d like to thank everyone who attended the event and we hope you were all able to take something away from it.

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 and be sure to sign up to become one of our testers.

Design for the customer…

not the service area.

However, this post is going to focus on the Web Services team, whose strikingly beautiful visages you can see on our Christmas post (Ho Ho Ho!).

As you may have noticed, there are only five of us – Chris Jones, Lewis Moorcroft, Louise Tierney, Sophie Ewan-Roberts & myself – yet over the last few years we we have managed to produce a wide variety of websites, some of which have been receiving praise from a lot of highly respectable people in the Public Sector and the web industry itself.

Although part of the usual bureaucracy that inevitably comes with Local Government, being a small team means our own processes of planning, developing and testing can run pretty quickly. This is due to knowing each others strengths and weaknesses, meaning we are able to work more efficiently together. A smaller, close-knit group also allows for a greater degree of trust, whether it be for relying on someone to deliver their work on time so that another member of the team can complete their bit, or for supplying new ideas or honest opinions, even when it may initially go against the original plan for a project or an idea from another member of the team.

Open communication is also beneficial when it comes to making the most of our time. Knowing what each member of the team is up to means that we are able to use the lulls in one project (normally when we are waiting on others to supply information or write content) to work on other projects, help out another team member, or do some prep work for work yet to start.

Of course, in order for us to deliver the work we do, we are heavily reliant on other teams within the council, such as the GIS team, the Integration team, the Network and the Server Support teams and, last but not least, the CCI team, who include the Web Manager (Lorna Perry) and Web Officer (Mark Jones), both ever-busy people in charge of our content.

We try to work as informally as possible, treating each of these other teams the same way we treat our own team members, that is, in a friendly, honest and open manner. We are lucky enough to have this working relationship, and extremely thankful for what these other teams do for us considering their own heavy workloads and busy schedules. We always try to repay this in kind – helping out when they have requests of their own – or, failing that, providing assorted biscuits or cakes!

Yes, we still have to go through some formal processes in our day-to-day work, however, we unofficially work to the ethos of “it’s easier to ask for forgiveness than to ask for permission” when it comes to trying something new. This approach allowed us to try out Umbraco as a potential CMS for our website via a beta site, and, despite an initial hiccup, it is the platform that is being used to deliver new.shropshire.gov.uk, which will eventually take over as the main council website.

We aren’t saying we are the perfect team – far from it in fact. We are still actively working out our own working practices, evaluating what approaches worked, what didn’t go so well, etc. We are still fairly new to developing with .NET, so some of the things we want to do with that (extending Umbraco for instance) can sometimes be slow going, although we are getting better!

Like most workplaces, the benefit and praise received from one team or from external sources may not be noticed by the rest of the organisation. It’s the same for us – we’ve received a lot of attention from the wider web community for what we’ve accomplished through this blog and with new.shropshire.gov.uk (for instance being name-checked as an inspiration for gov.uk), but it is still hard to convince other service areas that we know what we are doing. We’ve taken a few steps to promote ourselves a bit more, such as taking part in a recent meeting of our web editors and explaining all the good things that are coming their way, but we still have a long way to go to build up our reputation within the council.

Perhaps this lack of a good reputation has led to our own timescales for rolling out new services areas to new.shropshire.gov.uk to be repeatedly hit by forces outside our control. If we were to be honest, even with our current status we could have mitigated a lot of these problems with clearer communication of our aims, coupled with some terms & conditions to clarify the scope of the work and responsibilities of every party involved.

All of these things aren’t excuses, they aren’t insurmountable barriers – these are the things that we learn from and use to improve ourselves. The trick is that we try to concentrate on the good that can be done rather than the trouble we go through to build and deliver those good things! And yes, a couple of extra developers would be helpful too, but for now it’s just us…

Hopefully I’ve been able to provide some answers to the surprised comments of “but how do you manage!??!”. If it doesn’t answer your particular question, then you can always rely on our willingness to help, either through putting your thoughts into words on our contact form, or by emailing us, phoning us or tweeting us!  If you are reading this before the 21st February 2013, you could always get a ticket for the Shropgeek Rebellion event & talk to us in person!

EDIT – the Rebellion event is sold out, but you can sign up for the waiting list.

“It’s wrong somehow” said the designer, his eyes shifting rapidly from section to section, “but . . . what is it? I can’t put my finger on it!”

A shadowy figure across the desk raised himself from his seat. The room seemed to darken in his presence. The figure bent across the partition and spoke in a low voice:

“Your content filler, it’s screwing up your eyes, distracting you from the visual presentation”.

The designer, visibly rocked by the timbre of the figure’s awesome voice absorbed this information.

‘Was he right? Were the content boxes filled with X’s distracting him from the visual presentation?’

The designer rolled back in his chair bowing slightly and, his voice trembling, enquired meekly, “What should I do, oh one whom they call ‘colleague’?”

“Use lipsum you fool! It’s been around for years”

…Oh, yeah.

And the designer designed happily ever after.

The End.

We already knew of lipsum right? (Lorem ipsum – just in case you don’t.)

Well, designers sometimes get tired of using the same old generated lipsum text. If you’re one of those designers then point your eyes at the following resources, you might find they cheer your day up a bit.

• Zombie Ipsum
• Hipster Ipsum
• Samuel L. Ipsum
• Bacon Ipsum
• And my personal favourite: Cupcake Ipsum

EDIT: As Steph Gray below mentioned, here’s a more relevant Lipsum generator to us Gov folks:

• http://ministryoflorem.com

EDIT 2: For all the Back to the Future fans out there:

• http://deloreanipsum.com/

Enjoooooy

(Left to right: Dale Shepherd, Sophie Ewan-Roberts, Lewis Moorcroft, Louise Tierney, Chris Jones)

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 to carry out some of the top tasks we had found in our statistics to ensure that they could:

1. Still find the information
2. Find it easier
3. Maybe learn something new along the way.

The information we got out of this session was priceless, it proved that we had made things better, but there was still room for improvement. For example, with something as simple as the menu button, we noticed that most of our testers scrolled past it, so we’ve now made it purple in the hope that other visitors to the site will spot it with ease.

We’d like to thank The Shrewsbury Coffeehouse for allowing us to come along during their busy lunch hour to speak with their customers.

If you’re interested in paying The Shrewsbury Coffeehouse a visit they are located on  Castle Gates, Shrewsbury. You can also follow them on twitter @CoffeehouseLtd.

Rich, who works there, looks forward to meeting you and says:

“There’s so much Christmas spirit there’s not enough room to swing a cat.”

We’re hoping to visit The Shrewsbury Coffeehouse again before Christmas so keep an eye on our Twitter account (@projectwip) for details. However, we’ve been told that to gain entry we must wear reindeer antlers or Santa hats…

We’re always on the look out for other suitable venues for conducting our usability tests. If any businesses think they could offer us a venue, access to customers and some free wifi then please get in touch.

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 have in our team is Notepad++, a free source code editor that supports a wide range of languages. It is quick and easy to use, and allows us to quickly read and update a variety of web scripts and markup without the headache of trying to remember which SDK we need to run for each web application. Whenever we have mentioned this it has been met with a mixture of approving nods from those who use it and quizzical expressions from the rest who had never heard of Notepad++.

In one instance, on a training course provided by an external company, we ended up talking the course instructor through the various features and plug-ins which he could potentially use for another course he was to teach the following week.  In our own work, the compare plugin is incredibly useful when comparing source code between live & development environments.

Komodo Edit

As some of us are using Macs, Komodo Edit is the preferred text editor for that OS, which has quite a number of similar features to those in Notepad++

Visual Studio

We are doing a fair bit of .NET development at the moment as we are moving our website content over into a new site built using the Umbraco CMS, so, for once, we are using the right tool for the job!

Browsers – lots of them…

The thing about the world is that there are lots of web browsers out there, each of them with their own way of interpreting the W3C standards for rendering web pages. Because of this, a design that looks and works perfectly in one may appear broken and unusable in another – an effect that was diminishing as browsers were striving to conform to those standards but is becoming obvious again with the advent of HTML5 and CSS3.

For us, this means keeping an eye on our website statistics and making sure that we test our projects with the most commonly used browsers, including IE, Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera. We were tempted to follow the same model that Google has set, whereby the applications developed by Google will only support the latest two versions of any one browser (bye-bye IE6 & 7 – yay!), though sadly came against the practical matter of the variety and age of computers within Shropshire Council, which means we still have to consider browser versions much older than this (oh, hello again IE6 & 7… *mutters & grumbles*).

Browser tools and add-ons

A common ground for everyone in the business of building websites and web applications is the regular use of the in-built development tools in the latest browsers (and the Firebug add-on for Firefox). No matter how well planned a website is, a large chunk of our development time is spent trying to find and fix various bugs with the layout on a page (due to those pesky discrepancies between browser engines), or why a script isn’t running as expected. Having those tools in a browser means we can quickly tweak and test any changes without making many modifications to the actual source code of a page.

For supporting the multiple versions of IE that are still in use, there is a handy little tool for testing older versions within a single install of Windows called IETester.

We do use other tools and browser add-ons to help us meet our accessibility standards, which I’ve covered in an earlier post.

Image editing software

Like many other web development/design companies out there, we do use Adobe Photoshop to help us create and manipulate images, but owing to our limited budget most of our team aren’t running on the latest version (or even one of the previous 4 versions in some cases).  Our editors rely on open-source solutions such as Paint.NET or GIMP to quickly tweak images for their content.

Online resources

Because of the shifting nature of our jobs, we try to keep up-to-date with design and development trends through other websites – either from studying their layout and design, or from reading reviews and tutorials on the latest development techniques. Most of this research happens during the planning/design/development stages of a project when we come across something we know how to do, but want to do better. In such situations we throw a question into Google and explore the results, as well as searching our personal favourite sites. Currently, the new.shropshire.gov.uk project is swaying my own learning towards Umbraco and .NET development, so the forums on our.umbraco.org and stackoverflow.com, and www.asp.net tend to appear in my browser tabs on a regular basis.

Google Analytics

The Google Analytics service is used on nearly all the websites we have produced, allowing us easy access to usage statistics and reports that we use to monitor, maintain and (hopefully) improve these online services.  We have also given some editors access so that they are able to review stats for their own sites or sections of the main shropshire.gov.uk website, allowing them to maintain their content more effectively.

Umbraco

We currently have a pretty good website running on a very old custom CMS built with Lotus Domino, but are working on migrating our various services to an even better version of our website built with an open-source CMS called Umbraco. We’ve written up a number of other posts on Umbraco and on the development of new.shropshire.gov.uk if you are interested.

WordPress (and MAMP/XAMPP)

We have a number of sites that we have created using WordPress, either through customising the standard TwentyTen/TwentyEleven/TwentyTwelve theme, or through a theme we have developed ourselves. Depending on the operating system we are using (we have a mixture of Windows/Mac systems here), we use XAMPP or MAMP to create a local Apache/MySQL/PHP environment to develop in.

SVN & GIT

Like all good developers, we rely on source control to keep our code tidy and to provide version control.  Primarily, this prevents us from causing havoc on our live websites, so if we accidentally upload something with a bug, or an errant typo (c’mon, we’ve all done it at some point…), then we are able to roll back to a previous stable version.

A recurring theme…

Some of you may have noticed that the majority of these applications are free, and some of those are open-source too. This is partially a decision shaped by the limited budget we have in Local Government, and also because we love open source!

All of these are things we have either come across from our own investigations, or have had recommended to us by others in our field of work. It may well be that some of you are using other software applications that can blow our choices out of the water. If so, please feel free to tell us about them – anything that can help us work better will always be welcomed!