Today (28 June 2011) we released v5.0.4 of our website. To the casual visitor, this won't mean much, but for us this release brings about more improvements for the shropshire.gov.uk website & our CMS.
I won't bore you with the CMS changes (but I will say that what we have received the comment "Love it , Love it, Love it!!" during the testing phase), so for this post we will focus on the improvements to the website itself.
What's new?
Following feedback about content that appears to be out of date, we've added a new notification that will appear on pages that are currently being reviewed. This alert will also allow you to give feedback to our Web Manager to help our editors update the content with the information you require.
Our online payments system has recently been updated, and we are now able to provide direct links to certain payment types. As such, the list of payment options on our "Pay for it" page has been reviewed, and direct links provided where applicable. Unfortunately some of our services require further information in order to take payments, and so we are not able to provide direct links to all of our online payment types at this time.
We've had some people voice their concern over the use of 0345 numbers for the main Shropshire Council contact lines, and so we have set up a new page detailing the reason for this choice along with the costs to you for using them. To make this easy to find we have added a "(How much does this cost?)" link to the footer next to the main telephone number.
To keep our website accessible for everyone, we have changed some of our code to help make our in-page content shortcuts easier to use for those relying on keyboard navigation with screen readers/magnifiers.
To touch slightly upon our CMS changes, we are now able to schedule newsflashes (meaning one of our skilled editors will not have to stay up late to add and then remove a newsflash for a planned overnight service outage), and can now provide a more varied range of links for our main homepage feature.
We release updates to our website regularly and take bug reports and change requests from our internal staff, partners and the public. If you've got an idea for an improvement you would like to see in our next website update, please let us know.