Council website redesign – Consultation now on!

Hi there

After many months of work in the background, we’re pleased to announce that we now have a proposed front page design for the relaunch of the St.Helens Council Website.

Please go to the test home page to have a look. Please use the comments box on this blog to let us know what you think.

Once you get onto the test site – you’ll find that much of the functionality is not currently working. However, you’ll be able to do the following:

- mouse over the news, event and “interact” images to change the images.

- mouse over the main promotional images  – these will ultimately link to appropriate pages.

- click, drag and drop the boxes in the centre of the according to your viewing preference

- click into the propsed News and What’s On pages

At this stage we’d love to know the following from you:

- what you think of the overall look and feel

- what else you think should be on the site

- what services you feel we should be offering online

Please use the comments box to let us know your thoughts, or if you can keep your comment to no more than 140 characters, the Twitterers amoung you can tweet or DM us @sthelenscouncil.

Lastly, thank you for your ongoing support and patience!

We hope you like the proposed new design. We look forward to receiving your comments.

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

Social Networking and Bookmarking added

Hi there

The main development this week on the St.Helens Council website is the adding of social networking and bookmarking options.

From the front page, there’s an “Interact with Us” section including more obvious links to our Facebook group and our Twitter feed.

We’ve also added bookmarking options to every page on the site. So please help us make an impact on the Digg and Delicious rankings by bookmarking us. (We may not knock the US Elections or iPhone news off the front pages for a while, but it’s a start!)

So, please check out the site, even if to just join us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter.

Please start giving us your feedback also. What do you think of the changes we’ve made so far? What else should we consider? How do you find the bookmarking links to use? Please let us know by commenting on this blog.

Thanks a lot.