Introducing… Maps

Over the past few months, we’ve been pretty busy, and pretty quiet. Most of our time has been spent finishing off the transfer from our old site to our new Warwickshire Direct / Council / Staff and Partners sites, and it’s been a pretty complex process – but it’s almost there.

While we’ve been doing that however, we’ve also been working on another, open, project. Maps.

To give a little backstory, we’ve wanted a replacement for Google Maps on the Warwickshire Direct site for almost as long as the new style has been live.

Not because we don’t like Google Maps – we think they’re brilliant – but we can’t get around some Ordnance Survey issues, and we just can’t afford their new pricing model.

So one afternoon three months ago, we sat down on a day where there weren’t many people in the office, grabbed a coffee, put our earphones in and began looking seriously at open projects. And in particular, we began looking at Open Layers in great detail.

And in the space of an afternoon – we had a (very rough) demo of a mapping site, using Open Layers to load a Google Map as its base, with some of our Open Data on top of it.

Shortly after that, when we’d shown the map off to a few people, we swapped the Google Map base out for OpenStreetMap. And then we put some OS derived data on top of it as a test.

Which looked – lovely. And before we knew it – we had something pretty flexible, and pretty powerful – and completely free.

About two months ago, we opened it up to our internal staff – specifically asking them to be be honest (and harsh) with us about what they thought. Our first round of testing (over the Christmas period) told us that our users weren’t going to use maps in the way we’d expected them to, and so we changed our approach dramatically. A little while later, changes to make the maps more usable were made – and we set a new version live.

Then people asked us to include some new things, and we did. And we tested how quickly we could swap out the base map for the entire system.

So with the rough drafts, the dramatic changes, the inclusions of new things, the swapping out of maps and the (fairly) constant set of updates and changes that we’re rolling out (plus, we’ve re-written it three times from the ground up, forgot to mention that) – you’re probably thinking that we must be spending a lot of time and energy on this. Right?

Nope.

That’s the best thing about all of this. From the start (six months ago) to now (mid March at the time of writing) – we’ve done roughly four weeks (20 working days) worth of ‘development’ work on it. And when I say ‘we’, I mean one member of staff doing the development – three pitching in with brilliant ideas. Work fitted in around other priorities, we should add.

If you’d like to look at our new maps, try one of these links:

• http://geo.warwickshire.gov.uk
• http://geofs.warwickshire.gov.uk

…both should be mobile friendly, but there are subtle differences between each version. Why? We just couldn’t decide which design we liked more – so we thought we’d leave it up to you to tell us.

When you’re using the maps please remember to give us as much feedback as possible. We really do want to make this a public led mapping system – and we can’t do that, without you.

By the way – we should add – we’re extremely thankful to the members of the Mappa Mercia project (a local OpenStreetMap group) who gave us a huge amount of help over the past few months, and lots of encouragement. They even trawled through Warwickshire data to try and clean up the map in advance of the launch – and they did it all for free. If you’re interested in mapping and you live around these parts – we’d thoroughly encourage you to go to a meetup and contribute to a truly amazing project.

Plus, our developer liked Open Layers and OpenStreetMap so much, he moved the project into an open WordPress theme – which he’ll be launching in the near future.

But now that we’ve done it – we’re left with a nagging question.

“Why on earth didn’t we do this before?”

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.

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.