Events Feed Added

Hi again

New updates to the website today include the addition of an events feed to the front page. You will now be able to see a quick snapshot of the variety of events that are on today, throughout the Borough. The data in this section is fed automatically from our constantly updated events database.

We’ve also added a link to our friendfeed in our “Interact with Us” section. If you’re on friendfeed, you can now follow all of our social media updates in one place. Currently it’s reading everything from Councillors’ Blogs, Twitter, Identica and Flickr.

Bar ironing out one or two minor glitches, phase 1 of the redevelopment of the site is now very nearly complete. As such, we’ll very soon be asking for volunteers to take part in our consultation to help us decide on a new design and test new features. If you’d be interested in taking part, please leave us a comment on the blog or simply email us.

Also, of course, let us know what you think of the new features to the site. Does the events feed work OK in your browser? Do you think it’s a useful feature?

As always, we look forward to receiving your comments.

Thanks for visiting.

Top of the Social Media league…for now

Hi there

Owing to the one or two issues we’ve experienced with the website this last week, some other updates have been delayed. We hope this week to have some more new features up. Thanks for your patience.

In the meantime, we’re pleased to report that we currently appear to be a leading light among our Local Authority colleagues in taking up Web 2.0 to improve communication with our customers. Looking at the brilliant Talkwiki website and specifically the The TALK Social Media Map, shows that St.Helens Council currently has the most social media links and web 2.0 applications of any local authority anywhere in the country!

The following are listed as examples of our use of web 2.0
- Our facebook page
- Our Twitter feed
- Our Web Team’s Twitter feed
- Our Where I Live page
- Our Streetworks page
- Councillors’ blogs
- This blog!
- Our Flickr page

and our two most recent additions:

- Our Identica feed
- Our friendfeed

As more and more authorities embrace web 2.0, we can’t imagine we’ll keep this position for long, but it’s good to see that our work in this area is being recognised.

What other social media / web 2.0 apps should we be using? What do you think of the way we’re using web 2.0? What other examples of good web 2.0 use should we be looking at?

As always, please do follow us or add us on any of the above to keep up to date with the work we do as a Council.

Thanks for your continued contributions and visits to the Web Development blog. The response and visit rates have so far well exceded our expectations. So keep visiting and keep commenting!

Thanks