Worthing Borough Council

• Customising Your Pages - Tutorial Video
• Hide and Show the Sidebar
• Feed Reader
• Leisure and Sports Clubs Search
• Library Catalogue Search
• Recycling and Refuse Days
• Travelling To Us
• Weather

Customise Your Pages

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01903 239999

enquiries@worthing.gov.uk

The Side-bar

The Worthing Borough Council website allows you to customise what you see on the homepage's right hand side. This 'special area' is called the sidebar.

When we asked people what they wanted from the website we found that many would like to be able to customise the homepage to display information that they looked at and needed regularly. You wanted to be able to show local events on the homepage, but also some people wanted the weather and the days their recycling will be collected on. Others wanted to see from the from the front page the current job vacancies and so on.

It was clear that many people used the website regularly for the same thing, so why not allow them to customise their homepage (and content pages) with the gadgets that delivered the things that they used most of all?

That's what the Side-bar and Gadgets allow you to do - customise the website to the way that you use it.

This is a screenshot

What is a gadget?

The gadgets are the boxes that sit in the 'side-bar', you can move them up and down and close them down if you do not need them. As standard we have picked the ones that best represented what people wanted on the homepage and the content pages. Of course you may have other needs and so you can change what you want to show.

If you have ever used the Mac's Dashboard in Tiger or Leopard or Windows Vista/7's side-bar then the concept is the same.

Moving a gadget

Moving a gadget

We've even put the standard gadgets in the order of preference most people wanted. But sometimes you may want to have something else at the top, or the bottom.

Move the mouse over the gadget title bar, the mouse will change to a 'Move' pointer. Click and drag the mouse up and down to drag the gadget up and down the order. A semi-transparent representation of the gadget will be moved around and in the side-bar where the gadget will be placed is marked by a dashed box with 'Drop Here' written it. When you have decided where you want it, release the mouse button. The order of the gadgets on the page is automatically saved for next time.

Adding a gadget

On the homepage click the Gadgets button at the top of the side-bar, or the Change My homepage Gadgets link at the bottom of the side-bar or click the link here:

• Change my Homepage gadgets

You can then tick the ones you want to show, and tick the ones you don't. You can also shuffle the order they are shown on the page from this list as well. Just click and hold on the gadget you want to move up the order they are shown in and move the mouse down to where you want to put it on the page.

Closing a gadget

Click on the 'cross' at the top right of the gadget. This will close it. You can add it back by adding the gadget back.

Hiding / Showing the side-bar

You can hide the side-bar from the website by clicking the Hide button at the top of the side-bar on the homepage. To show it again click Show to reveal it. The website will remember this setting on your computer.

Configure Gadgets Screen

The standard settings

As standard our home page uses the:

• Recycling and Refuse Gadget
• Feed Reader - Get local news, events and council job vacancies in one gadget
• Weather Gadget
• and Travelling To Us Gadget

A quick note on privacy and security

Privacy and security are hot topics for users and rightly so. No data relating to what gadgets you have chosen is sent and/or stored on our servers, neither is any information such as your street. All of this is stored on your own PC as a browser cookie. Your settings are not stored on our servers, they are saved on your computer. Finally the cookies do not have any unique tracking codes that allow us to identify users. We respect your privacy and regard security as a foremost priority with our web services.

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