LG/WWW

You might have seen in the media, it's been a bit soggy in Berkshire over the past couple of weeks. They say necessity is the mother of invention and because of the flooding we bought forward the launch of our new news page by a few months. The page is still a bit rough round the edges in its design, doesn't yet do all it will, but we took the same line as the Government Digital Service , and release something that's certainly a Minimum Viable Product . It'll eventually show a summary of latest blogs, events listings and most recent consultations, but for now it just provides the additional functionality of a feed of news. What's so special about that? Don't most council sites have a list of press releases? As well as our news content, including the service status of over 100 schools, libraries, car parks, children's centres and more (something we introduced during the snow of 2010) it gives us the ability to import tweets into the news feed. Th...

This week the Department for Education (DfT) changed twenty or so pages on their site, so I thought I'd write about it. Seriously, that's what this piece is about. So you're probably thinking, why does it matter, it's the department's site they can do what they like, and you'd be right. You're probably thinking, twenty pages, we've published more in one go before, it's not a big deal, and you'd be right. So why on earth am I writing about it? When it comes to digital, Central Government and local governments need to work closer together. The LocalGov Digital Content Standards promote this idea, and there's a whole section called "Is the content original" which basically says, if it already exists, link to it. I've seen whole parts of local governments' websites that have been lifted from others' including those of Central Government. In almost all cases, this is a complete waste of time. Why reproduce what a ...