Get Involved! (Part 1)

In earlier posts and new stories, we have hinted that we will be using your feedback to shape the websites. This wasn’t a hollow promise, and your time to shine is now here.

Sort Warwickshire’s Services

As we’ve mentioned, Warwickshire County Council offers an awful lot of services, and we need to start structuring the website in a way that makes it easy to find them.

When we (as WCC staff) think of how our services might be ordered, we often fall into the trap of following our internal structures. So instead of finding a service in a ‘useful’ section, it’ll be hidden in one named after a department or a team, which may make no sense to you.

So we would like you to categorise our services for us. We promise, it’ll only take a few minutes. In fact, the quicker and more impulsive your answers, the better! There are 166 services to sort, but we really don’t expect anyone to work through them all. Just click the ‘Done’ button when you’ve had enough.

Now that the evenings are drawing in, why not make an evening of it and get the whole family involved? The more people doing this, the better the website at the end.

Simply visit the following website and follow the instructions.

Sort Warwickshire’s Services

It’s completely anonymous, there are no right or wrong answers, and the only prize is the warm sense of pride from knowing that you helped shape such a well-visited website.

Many thanks in advance!

P.S.
For the record, we’re using a piece of kit called WebSort.

Three Into One Won’t Go…

What’s the problem?

Have you used our website recently? What did you think? Did it answer your questions?

Could you find the school holiday dates for next year? Were you able to quickly renew that library book? Could you easily report that pothole at the end of your road? How about that Minerals Core Strategy? Or, if you’re a one of our mental health professionals, the Primary Care Mental Health Guidelines?

Warwickshire.gov.uk is vast. At last count, we had over 6000 pages. Add in all the minutes, agendas, events, news stories, and other bits from our databases, and this shoots up to over 20,000 pages!

“Why so much?”, I hear you ask. Well, as an organisation, Warwickshire County Council produces a lot of information aimed at a huge number of different people, all fighting for attention, on just one website. There’s information for people who want to find out about our services. We have all the ‘council information’ – for example, our Corporate Business Plan. We have information for staff who can’t get onto our Intranet. We have information for our partners.

And all of this information is in the same site, jostling for position, getting in the way of each other, and generally making it hard to find what you want. There’s no focus.

We’ve tried our best to keep this in some kind of order, and have the grey hairs to prove it. But we’ve finally come to the simple conclusion – it just won’t all fit into one single website.

An amicable separation

So what are we proposing?

Over the next eight months, we will be taking the website, shaking it around, and splitting it into three new websites. Introducing (in no particular order):

Warwickshire Direct – our customer website. As a Warwickshire resident or business, this will be the place to get information about our services. Maybe to apply for a skip permit, join the library, or report a rogue trader. Maybe to get some advice on bullying, find out about home care, or more information on becoming a foster parent. Maybe looking for some business advice.

The name ‘Warwickshire Direct’ may already be familiar if you’ve ever used our One Stop Shops. Or our telephone customer contact centre. It’s the brand for our other ‘customer channels’, so it makes sense to continue that across to the website.

Corporate Website – information about Warwickshire County Council. It doesn’t have such a catchy title as Warwickshire Direct, but it’s as important. This site will contain all the strategies, the budgetary reports, the performance reports, business plans, committee meeting minutes and agendas, and everything else along those lines.

Please don’t think for a second that we’re looking at hiding this information away. We understand that we are public servants and that WCC is a publicly accountable organisation. Setting this up as a separate website will help improve our transparency and openness by making it easier to find all of this information.

Staff, Partners and Practitioners – exactly as it says. Our creativity was running low by this stage, so there’s no whizzy name for this website. Basically, it will contain information and services for WCC staff (who can’t get onto our Intranet), staff within partner organisations, and anyone else delivering services in association or partnership with WCC.

As an added bonus, we’ll also be improving the existing The Zone site, aimed at children and young people. This will allow us to pull all the information aimed at kids (currently spread across 20-odd websites) into a single place.

We’ll be explaining more about these in future posts, along with changes and ideas that will affect all sites (for example, improved access for disabled users and mobile-friendly content).

We want your feedback on all of this. We will soon be running an online ‘card-sorting’ session, where you can sort our services into the way you think they should be. But in the meantime, if you do have any comments or queries, you can either email us (webmaster@warwickshire.gov.uk) or leave a comment.

For You And You And You And…

This blog will chart the largest round of developments to happen to the Warwickshire County Council website since its launch over ten years ago.

The aim of the work is simple – to improve the way all of our visitors find information, access our services, and feedback to the council online.

We therefore need your input. We’ll be posting progress reports, designs, consultations, etc and really hope you tell us what you think.

We realise that the vast majority of visitors to our site aren’t web developers, so we’ll try to avoid any technical conversations (if we do accidentally stray into this arena, please feel free to rein us back in). We also want to steer clear of talk of strategies, visions and the like.

Instead, we want to focus on the areas that really affect you as a Warwickshire resident, business or visitor – the bits that will actually affect how you use the site, the designs, the navigation, the structure, the popular tasks, etc.

(If you are a website developer and interested in the technical work currently going on within the council, take a look at the rather excellent A Big Bang – ICT Strategy blog.)

And if you’d like to contact us about anything (within reason), please feel free to drop us an email (webmaster@warwickshire.gov.uk) or phone 01926 736342.