LG/WWW

It’s fair to say that most Local Authority websites are a collection of text based articles, in fact that’s a reasonably good description of most websites. Sure, many will have a forum or two, perhaps an events calendar, in fact all Local Authority websites will have at least a small amount of more complex functionality, but on the whole they’re based around pages of text. Recently I’ve started to look at website content in a different way, not just as text but as a collection of objects. To illustrate what I mean by this, let’s take an example of a page about a library . A conventional page would be an article with textual information about the library. It would probably contain things like the address of the library, contact details, perhaps a map, perhaps events at the library and so on. An object however would be a digital representation of that library. The object would contain metadata about what type of object the library is, the latitude and longitude of whe...

Not so long ago most websites were generally created to do one just thing, to publish the same information to the same people at the same time. Improvements in line speed, browser functionality and Internet availability mean that these days websites are generally used for two more tasks, service delivery and user engagement. One website isn’t enough for many medium to large organisations, some having multiple web presences each aimed at different audiences. Recently I’ve been looking at how this could be reflected in what local authorities offer online and have come to the conclusion there are two distinct groups who might access a council website, customers and citizens. With this in mind I looked at how a site could be created for each type of user, in effect splitting an existing site into two. The initial concept of the sites should be simple. The customer wants easy access to services or service information and to be able carry out what they came to the site for ...

Much has been made of BCCDIY in the past couple of years or so, some heralding it as a new dawn in local authority service delivery. It's the website that does for free what the official Birmingham City Council (BCC) does, if reports are to believed for an amazing £3.3m, or at least did. As of last week however the expensive offering does have one thing over the free facility, it's still up and running. Those such as Conrad Quilty-Harper in the Telegraph who even as late as this August were singing the praises BCCDIY might now have reconsider their point of view. Perhaps this is a premature post-mortem and someone just forgot to renew the domain but at the very least if the official BCC website was off-line for a fortnight I'm betting quite a few people might have complained and if not I’m very sure that someone might have at least noticed. A Google search at time of writing reveals that perhaps no one has noticed that BCCDIY has gone AWOL. In truth BCDIY ...