Shepway District Council Website: User Review

Shepway District Council (OK - not all of them: a couple of Officers and a Cabinet member) have asked me for feedback on things to improve on the Shepway Council website at www.shepway.gov.uk as they are about to do some enhancement of the site. If you've got views on the site and things that need fixing / improving (or you think are great!) then please let me have your feedback at tim@prater.org.uk and I'll add them to my report to Shepway.

I'll be looking at the site over the weekend, and using this article as a log of items I plan to mention. If you've seen things I've missed, please let me know: if they didn't want comprehensive feedback, then they shouldn't have asked! I should start however by saying there are a number of positives: it's just that at this time, I haven't been asked for a list of those...

• All RSS feeds broken (not taking recent news) http://www.shepway.gov.uk/content/view/200118/1/
• Press release links on front page should be dated
• The "What;'s Hot" section on the front page - isn't. It's old content (that actually, may be feeding the RSS feed mentioned above looking at it!). "Your Councillors" are not, and never will be, "hot".
• Twitter feed (http://twitter.com/shepwaydc) doesn't update on new stories in real time when added to the site (although the regular retweeting of my tweets is EXCELLENT ;)
• Too many pages simply have a link redirecting to the page you actually wanted. for example, clicking "Council committee meetings, agendas and minutes" on http://www.shepway.gov.uk/content/category/1/100004/1604/ leads to http://www.shepway.gov.uk/content/view/200514/1604/ which then offers a link to instead of linking directly.
• The Navigation Menu is almost impossible to follow unless you already have a clear idea of the structure of the council.
• Search function has no ranking of most likely content. A search for "Committee Minutes" returns 53 matches unranked, and seemingly none directly to http://www.shepway.gov.uk/webapp/cads/ which seems the most obvious.
• Search would be easier if it offered "intelligent search" options as you typed.
• Top menu inconsistent between pages (in Firefox only?) http://www.shepway.gov.uk/content/view/1799/1930/ compared with http://www.shepway.gov.uk/mos/Frontpage/
• Left hand side links under the Direct gov logo are pretty much invisible (are they intended to be there?)
• Front page link In the lead article) to www.shepway.getcomposting.com doesn't work
• http://www.shepway.gov.uk/content/view/200416/1414/ suggests you can sign up for a Garden Waste bin and pay online. Following the links however, you are (eventually) asked for a "Property Reference Number" - which you have to phone the council to get.

That's a starting dozen (in no order!). If you have have more and can help make the site better by giving your feedback, please email tim@prater.org.uk (and if you can put in descriptions / links to where you find problems, that would really help!). Thank you!