Rochford District Council’s website is pretty well used, with about 50,000 visitors per month. However , there’s always room for improvement- and there’s going to be a ‘new’ council website up and running on January.
Early reports about it are quite exciting- with:
Improved intuitive navigation,
Improved look and feel,
Local View – ‘find my nearest’ doctors/polling station etc and reporting systems for many different things including street lighting, fly tipping etc etc
Web camera on top of the Rayleigh Windmill,
Llve Essex traffic news,
Live weather information,
Live BBC News headlines for Essex,
Improved accessibility including access keys, changes to text size,
Improved district gallery,
New Youth Zone to communicate with young people.
For the technically minded:
– there will be RSS functionality on some areas of the website data,
– the website itself will be compatible for Forefox and Opera. However, other third party applications attached to the site such as public access to planning and CMIS ( the committee management information system) will carry on to work as before to the specific manufacturers’ specifications.
Of course, just because it’s easier to report problems such as faulty streetlighting or grafitti , it doesn’t mean the council has the means to sort it out quicker. Even so, it looks like being a great improvement….