An online notebook
I wrote a little while ago about how council’s websites might look, and ventured the idea that perhaps all that is needed is a big search box.
Look what Cheltenham Borough Council have got now!
OK, so it isn’t the home page, but it has extra use as it searches other local sites too.
Great work. If anyone knows the folk behind this stuff, can you make sure they come along to LocalGovCamp? 😉
I wrote a little while back about a fairly terrible website being used by Cambridgeshire’s Transport Commission to consult people on their views.
Cambridge News now reports:
A PROBE into Cambridgeshire’s transport crisis – including the idea of a congestion charge for Cambridge – has been hit by a technical blunder.
The chairman of the Cambridgeshire Transport Commission, Sir Brian Briscoe, has revealed the commission’s website has been affected by “initial teething problems”.
The result is that some of the responses to the commission’s request for people’s views on how to tackle the traffic issue have been lost.
People are now being contacted to resubmit their views. Let’s hope they can be bothered.
Oh dear oh dear. I found out that this website cost the sum of £2,990 to produce. Now, that might not sound like a huge amount, but for a microsite like this it’s a sizable budget. What the Transport Commission got for their money was – frankly – piss poor, and it now turns out that it doesn’t even work properly.
Simon Berry’s ColaLife campaign is a truly wonderful thing, a real example of using the groundswell to develop an idea into a campaign and then, hopefully, into action.
I was always at a bit of a loss, wanting to help out more than just joining the Facebook group, but not knowing really what I could do. Other than build websites, of course…
So that’s what I did. ColaLife now has an external web presence, so people can find out about it without being a Facebooker. I made the site deliberately simple to navigate, hiding the blog bit away and relying on images to help get the message across. Another great example of WordPress as CMS…
We’ve imported all the posts from Simon’s personal blog onto the site, so it can become the central repository for all things ColaLife. In the meantime, do register your support by joining the FB group and the Google email group.
Really interesting post from Paul Canning, discussing the recent assertion by Richard Steele, SOCITM‘s President, that web should be just another part of IT within organisations.
Paul says:
Web skills are very specific, you need to be across a lot of terrain. You need to understand SEO, usability, web content, have good people skills, be across various and ever changing IT, visual design, accessibility, marketing, PR … Even the very best IT managers don’t have this skill range so they can’t make informed decisions or informed choices across the range of issues which constitute good and most importantly successful web.
Good stuff from Paul, and of course I agree with him, being a web and definitely not an IT person. Indeed, I would a couple of bits to Paul’s list about webbies needing to be excellent communicators, and maybe a real interest in policy is important too.
I have had a really great idea for a little site that I think will be of use to quite a few people in the UK. Trouble is, it relies on using the Google Maps API, and I haven’t a clue how that works, despite my recent best efforts trawling through the documentation.
The basic idea is pretty simple: a homepage with a zoomable map of the UK on it , with markers on the map which when clicked display information about that location. I’d like eventually to be able to show people directions from their address to one or more of the markers too, but that can come later.
I’m guessing that, given there is plenty of information to be handled, a MySQL/PHP/Google Maps integration job might be on the cards. Again, beyond me at the moment, but I just need someone to point me in the right direction.
Can anyone help?