webcontentmanager

Storify-ing part the one

A first bash at Storify: chose a biggie, the Olympic Torch Relay through North Devon, 21 May 2012.

Feed me

Peeps may not use readers and the wonderful Netvibes has fallen off the edge, but RSS feeds are still a brilliant way of pushing out content.

Ergo, build feeds and widgets to repurpose and display feeds. Develop an API even?

In the meantime, the non-techincal content guy gets to wrestle every {%} with screen scrapers to build feeds of own content.

Go figure.

PS - http://feed43.com/ is pretty cool.{*}

Page rank too high

I’ve been asked to carry out contra-SEO. Page rank too high!

Google “environmental health contact” and our contact details come top.

Brilliant! I am the SEO king!

Except that our out of hours officer gets phone calls from Glasgow about noise complaints.

Possible solutions

- change page name to include council name

- delete page, contact details already on every EH page

When you wish upon a (four) star(s)

Better connected 2012: the local government website scorecard

• two stars, down from three
• disappointing, but not unexpected: for a number of reasons we’ve stood still, but expectations are higher
• focus on top tasks, which is where we fall down, but it’s part of the work progamme
• comments that the site is information rather than task focused, which confirms my view that we could lose about 75% of the content and not suffer
• that said, reviews are still subjective rather than objective
• very little recognition of the huge amount of effort put into mapping/find your nearest
• improvements in accessibility: despite a content management system that struggles
• usability patchy: A to Z is a pain in the neck, our Google boxes below its weight
• all that social media effort got noticed
• our code is fine; but our connectivity is poor