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To: FA&P Committee Ref: M001/1209/FAP
From: Tony Daniells - Clerk to the Council
Date: 4 December 2009
Re: DPC Website
Changes to the website : At the last meeting of this Committee, the Clerk was asked to look at the website to see if it was easy to use [min ref 76/10FAP]. The answer to that is ‘it depends’. Minutes and agendas are easy to find. Details of Councillors are also easy to find. This is because they can be located under a descriptive header on the left hand side navigation panel. Other items that have been looked for recently such as flag flying days, Aims & Aspirations documents have been difficult to find.
I have discussed this with the Deputy Clerk and it was agreed that the home page was too busy. Carrera have been asked to make changes to collapse many of the headings to make the page less busy. If you now look at the headings on the left hand blue bar and click on one, it will give a drop down menu of what is available under that heading. It was hoped that just by hovering the cursor over the heading, the menu would drop down automatically. Without re-writing the website, this is not possible.
To help users find the information they were looking for, a site map was suggest but Carrera have responded by advising that this would be easy to do but difficult to maintain as thye site is old and the site map would not be updated dynamically due to the age of the site and the technology available at the time. An alternative is to write a search routine and Carrera are working on this. This will allow users to search the DPC website for anything. So for example, you could search on ‘agendas’ and get a list of every instance, or refine the search with a month and year and just get agendas for that time period.
Carrera have also been asked to create a new category for ‘Documents’. Here we can store reports, policies, memos all in the one place. Each entry will have a reference number, title and a minute reference can be added if necessary. The document will then be cut and pasted onto the website similar to the way we make agendas and minutes available.
Reports on the Website: You will notice that this memo has a reference at the top r/h corner. This allows documents to be referred to in the agendas, and then put onto the website under ‘Documents’ The document reference follows a convention to allow easier identification and uniqueness. Once the meeting has taken place and minuted, the document on the website will be update to include the minute reference. User of the website can then look up the minutes to see the outcome of the document.
As ever, the website is not a static one, but will evolve to meet requirements. The above changes are part of that process. Further changes will be made on request or to meet an identified need.
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