New website features

After a lot of work, today, we’ve begun to roll out the brand new www.warwickshire.gov.uk. And there are a couple of things that are new and different that you might want to know about.

Brand new name

The biggest change is a name change. Warwickshire County Council is a firm believer in delivering excellent customer service, and has invested a lot of time and focus into working with other local authorities and organisations within Warwickshire under the name of ‘Warwickshire Direct’.

If you’ve been to one of our One Stop Shops in the county, or phoned our Customer Service Centre, you’ll have already been served by a member of Warwickshire Direct staff. It therefore made sense to change the customer-service part of the website over to Warwickshire Direct.

This doesn’t mean all of the council information is gone, or that we’ll be going through an expensive re-branding exercise. But we have started to focus much more on delivering customer services through the website. However, a separate ‘council’ area is accessible from the top of every page, with a similar layout to Warwickshire Direct, which we intend to launch in the near future.

Homepage features

We’ve tried to make the latest information about the council even more accessible to you from the homepage. Our features section will cover three of the most prominent happenings within the county, and will be updated on a regular basis.

Every page has it’s own address

You might have noticed that, by default, the addresses / URLs of our pages contained lots of superfluous letters and numbers. If you, like us, tend to remember web pages by their addresses, this wouldn’t have been that helpful to you. Now every Warwickshire Direct page has its own short address. Looking for a page about weddings in Warwickshire, that’s three levels in? No problem – www.warwickshire.gov.uk/weddings is all you’ll need to remember from now on.

Standard page layout and additional information

Sub-pages on the site now have key information separated out onto the right hand side of a page, to make important details, documents or related information more directly accessible to you. This is the same across all of the pages to make it easier to find the information you need.

We’ve broken this area down into the following broad sections:

Rate this page

We want to know if you’re happy with the way we’ve presented information to you, if you think we could be doing something better on a page, or if you’re very unhappy about a piece of content. To this end, we’ve made the ‘rate this page’ feature more prominent.

Contact details

On our old design, we sometimes found it a little difficult to work out which team to contact about a service, or find where they were based (if we needed to see them in person). So, we’ve made the contact and address details for each service much more prominent – and (where possible) provided direct address information to help you find our offices.

Top tasks

Feedback you’ve given us (along with analytical data and conversations with services) has given us a good idea of the kind of key tasks you’re trying to do when you visit our site. So, to make them easier for you, we’ve pushed them out into their own section so you can’t miss them.

Downloads and documents

If you’ve visited our site before – you might have noticed that we like to publish lots of documents online. With the redesign, we’ve aimed to make these documents more accessible to you (by providing document information in PDFs, or defined structures in Word files), give you an indication of their filesize, and their type within the link text. We’ve also added in a little at-a-glance indication for you (by way of an icon) to give you a heads up if you’re about to download a file.

You may also be interested in

Just as with ‘top tasks’, your feedback gives us a good idea of the types of related information you’re looking for, or might be interested in. So, to make that easier to find too, hand-picked additional links are present on most pages. And where we’ve linked

Social bookmarking

If a page on our site is useful to you – we want you to be able to share it. To that end, for our content pages, we’ve added in some extra functionality that will help you to quickly share a page on Facebook, Twitter, Delicious, Digg, Stumbleupon, Reddit or save it to Evernote. It’ll also help you to mail a quick link to a friend.

Latest news

On our old design, it wasn’t easy to find the latest news relating to a service (such as community safety or highways). Our latest initiatives would often get missed in amongst other content, and important information wouldn’t be as easily available to you as we wanted it to be. Over the next few weeks, we’ll be rolling out service-based news – and making it much harder to miss.

We’ll also be rolling out something a bit bigger for news in general soon – but we’ll tell you more about that another time.

Upcoming events

Our events system was, and still is, jam-packed full of happenings in and around Warwickshire. And, if you were on our front page, or in our events system – all of this information was readily available to you. But if you were on one of our sub-pages – you might have found it a little hard to find out about the latest events.

Over the coming weeks, we’ll be rolling out service / content based events information across the site. Expect to see details of upcoming walks on the main country parks page, rhyme-times on the main libraries page, and more.

‘Me@WCC’ is now ‘my account’

‘Me@WCC’ was a term we used to define your online account with Warwickshire County Council. When we first looked at redesigning the site, this was one of those areas that we wanted to both make more usable – and more familiar to you.

So, to make it a little similar to other websites, we’ve dropped the ‘Me@WCC’ name, in favour of something a bit simpler. But – for now – the name is the only thing that’s changed. You can still log in with your current ‘Me@WCC’ details, sign up for school closure alerts, and use all of our other services.

Google Maps / Street View

We think that maps make things so much easier to find. So, we’ve spent a little time making the interactive maps we already had a little more prominent, and creating ones where we thought they’d be useful. We also decided to use Google’s map service to make the information available to you in general search results through Google Maps on your Android / iOS device.

In some places, we’ve also added in Google Street View versions, so you can see a building / place before you visit.

YouTube videos

We’ve been using YouTube to showcase our videos for awhile now – but now we’re planning to use it even more. Over the coming months we’ll be integrating YouTube videos into appropriate pages, and experimenting with their HTML5 player to deliver the same content to you across multiple devices.

In addition, we’ve been making sure that subtitle tracks are added to videos wherever possible – and turning them on by default.

Flickr photographs and galleries

Over the coming months, we will be exploring the possibilities of opening up some of our photographs under a creative commons license. To this end, we’ve begun exploring how we could use Flickr to help you find these photographs, and help us present them to you in an attractive manner.

Once we’ve completed the rollout of the new site, we’re hoping to talk to you a bit more about our photographs online, and what you’d find useful in the future.

Search engine

Searches on our site are now quicker to complete that ever before – with a search box in the top right hand corner of each page. Tap in the box – type – press return/enter – and get your results. We’ve tried to make a searching our site a quicker experience for you, and are trialling a few of extra enhancements for browsers with HTML5 capabilities.

We’ve also overhauled the design of our search engine, and tried to make it clearer when a search result will take you to a file (as opposed to a webpage), by adding those same ‘at-a-glance’ icons to the left of some results.

Recommended results

We’ve spent a lot of time looking at the results our search engine is bringing back to you, and trying to make our recommended results even more prominent, to make sure you don’t miss the right information. Recommended results are highlighted in boxes at the top of your search results, and will be maintained by us based on your feedback, and the feedback of service owners.

Accessibility

The overhaul of our site had a big objective in mind – to make our services and information easier to access for visitors with disabilities. We’ve therefore introduced a number of features to help visitors that use assistive technology – eg screenreaders – as well as improving the experience across other devices, such as mobile phones and tablet computers.

We’ve introduced access keys, allowing people to move to specific parts of the website, such as the search engine and our help section, just by using the keyboard. Our access keys page has more information on this.

Our developments to our content management system (the software that runs the website) has let us introduce semantic markup to our pages. Essentially, this allows your browser to put meaning to the pieces of text on the page – so it knows that a header is actually a header, not just large text. This, in turn, helps screenreaders to make sense of the page and can assist users navigate around pages.

Mobile friendly

The use of semantic markup (see above) has allowed us to roll out a page layout specifically for mobile phones. This places the right-hand information boxes at the bottom of the page, rejigs the header so that the links in it can all be seen on a narrow screen, and reduces the number of images displayed.

We certainly intend to investigate this area a bit more, exploring how best to display the site on other types of devices.

JavaScript

We’ve made great use of JavaScript during the redesign to provide dynamic information to you (such as the latest news relating to a service, or events at country parks) or graphical enhancements (such as the slideshow on the front page of the Warwickshire Direct site).

In doing this however, we’re aware that not everyone will have JavaScript enabled on their browsers (either due to personal preference or organisational security settings). In as many cases as possible where JavaScript isn’t available to you, we’ve attempted to provide an alternative, non-JavaScript way to access the same information. If you spot an area where we could be doing this better – please let us know via webmaster@warwickshire.gov.uk.

Supported browsers

Following on from Microsoft’s recent announcement of their intention to encourage people to upgrade older, less secure, versions of their web browser – this year, we’ve taken the decision to drop support for Internet Explorer 6.

The site has been designed to work with the major free web browsers available today (Internet Explorer 7 and up, Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera, and other Webkit/Gecko based browsers), and has been tested on Windows XP/Vista/7, OSX and various Linux derivatives (Ubuntu, OpenSUSE). We’ve also tested it in some of the more obscure browsers, such as Links and Konqueror.

Bugs

Finally, we’ve spent a lot of time trying to iron out bugs over the past year, but if we’ve missed anything – or a page doesn’t load in the way you’re expecting it to – please don’t hesitate to let us know via webmaster@warwickshire.gov.uk. It would help us greatly if you can include information about the page you’ve visited (with a link and a screenshot would be ideal), the problem you’ve encountered, and your daytime contact details.