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.

New Leisure Services Microsite and Mapping Services page

Hi there again

Whilst immediate development on the main website is currently being concentrated on the eventual redesign, there is unlikely to be any major further developments visible until early 2009.

In the meantime, however, we’re pleased to announce the launch of the new micro-site for St.Helens Council’s  “Go Active” Leisure Services.

The new site follows refreshed branding set up to represent the service as a whole which will soon be visible across all leisure centres.

This is the first version of the site, which will soon offer online bookings. You can also find the centre nearest to your address with a google map.

Mapping  Services

On the subject of mapping, there is now a new mapping services page on the Council website. From here you can get information on both Google and PlanWeb OS platforms. There are also links to help pages for both systems.

What do you think of the page? Do the various map options work OK in your browsers? What else would you like to see us use mapping for?

 

Consultation Group

Also, please don’t forget to join our Web Consultation Group, to make sure you have your say in the redesign of the Council website. Simply leave a comment on this blog or email us to take part.

Thanks for visiting the blog.

Jobs feed added

Hi again

The latest feature on the website is the addition of the latest jobs feed.

Whenever a new job vacancy is added online, the feed will be updated. If you’re interested in receiving the latest on all job vacancies at St.Helens Council, set your browser or aggregator to read it. You can get to it from the front page of the site, at the top of the “Popular Links” section.

As with all of our feeds, all updates will be sent through our Twitter feed.

We are also progressing with a proposal for the redesign of the site. Don’t forgot to joing our consultation group where you can get a preview on the new design and give us your feed back on what you think. As before, to get involved, just leave us a comment here or simply email us.

Also, please do let us know any comments you have about the site or any suggestions as to how we can improve our online services.

Thanks again for visiting our blog. We’ve had over 1200 visits since we started, so thanks a lot for your continued support.

Join our website consultation group

Hi there

As phase 1 of the redevelopment of the website is now completed, we’re now looking towards the major redesign.

Our Web Team are in the process of putting three designs together for what the site will look like early next year (hopefully late February – March) and, from December, we need you to help us choose the best one.

To that end, we’re setting up a Website Consultation Group of users. The consultation will take place exclusively online with a discussion group hosted by ning.com. Anyone can join the group, but you will need to register with us first so we can set you up with a password.

By joining the group, you will be given access to the three prototype sites and invited to share your comments on the forums based on:

• General design
• Accessibility
• Navigation
• Online services

To register with us, either leave a comment on this blog or email us.

For more information on what’s involved, again, please email us or call 01744 671609.

We anticipate that the consultation process will begin at the beginning of December, so please do join up soon.

Thanks.

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

Welcome to our blog

Thanks for visiting the St.Helens Council Web Development Blog.

From October 2008 onwards, we aim to update our website to really improve our online services.

We’ll be using this blog to tell you whenever a new development goes live. For the moment, most changes to the site will be cosmetic. Over the coming weeks, we should have a new page header, more events information on the front page, bookmarking options, direct links to our various social networking pages (Facebook, Twitter and Flickr).

From January 2009, we aim to totally revamp the site – with more cosmetic and functional changes.

Please use the comments box on this blog to let us know any comments or issues you have with any of the developments we put online.

In the meantime, thanks for visiting the blog!