Worthing Borough Council

Vicky Lamburn is the council's web developer (that's me) and we have a team of web contributors and moderators however the technical development and overall steer comes from the Web Developer. We don't have a web team here, just myself and another colleague who is proficient in HTML/Javascript and server side scripting for other smaller projects.

The main council website was relaunched in May 2008 after 11 months development. It was a from scratch website with no old structures and limitations being carried over.

We have implemented the following:

• Customisable pages with a sidebar and gadgets platform that requires no login to configure, it is cookie based
• Gadgets can be downloaded to Mac OS X dashboard as widgets or Vista as sidebar gadgets. First one made available w/c Oct 6th is the Bin Collection Days gadget - Vista one available, OS X widget available by next week. Allows people to see their bin collection days on their computer's desktop.
• RSS Feeds for common information from the council including News, Events, Jobs and website updates. Planning based RSS feeds are also in the pipeline
• Interactive rating of pages using stars if Javascript is enabled or a standard web form when it's not
• Interactive Consultation forums (have your say) feature in final phase of beta testing and will be going live w/c 13th October
• Improved Do It On-line service to integrate popular on-line tasks/services closer to the services themselves and giving them some structure
• Social bookmarking
• E-mail a page to a friend
• Comments allowed on any page with answers provided
• OpenSearch plugin for Firefox 2/3 and IE 7/8 with our search engine
• User contributed photos

We are also proceeding with:

• Further Vista/OS X gadgets based on our sidebar's gadgets
• Building common themes to answer common users' questions
• Further improvements to our A to Z and Search solution
• Listening to what users think and acting accordingly
• Improving the integration of our mapping/GIS software
• User contributed photo albums possibly on Flickr
• Consideration for blogs and twitter feeds but this is a low priority

Much more to happen clearly in the future including getting all the content up to date and up to scratch, more FAQs and running the other 6 council websites we have so I'm a busy person but if you doubt that you can do any Web 2.0 'things' and like me you are the web development team per se, it can be done.

More than happy for peeps to e-mail me on webmaster@worthing.gov.uk for further details but be warned I may take a day or two to reply as I prioritise with incoming e-mail from the public :)