Website Information

Welcome to the website information pages. These pages contain all the information related to what websites we run, how we do it and much more besides. Worthing Borough Council prides itself on its proactive stance towards the Internet and world wide web. We are advocates of web standards, web accessibility and web innovation. In fact as of May 2008, Worthing Borough Council is the second-only local government website that allows you to customise your pages with useful gadgets -- much like a Facebook page.

So far in 2008

Starting in January 2007 we started a number of major overhaul across all of Worthing Borough Council's websites. Whilst these improvements have been vast; there is still a lot of work to be done though. Some of the things we have been able to do since January include:

• Structural Validity:  or  compliant XHTML
• Presentation Validity:  Compliant Cascading Style-Sheets (CSS)
• Accesibility Validity: standard and where possible reaching the accessibility standards set in
  
• Bringing fresh, innovative and unique designs to our websites. We're not about just creating websites to reach a target, we want to innovate and provide something truly great too.
• That people of all abilities should be able to enjoy their experience on our websites.

New websites

We have done so much more and in time we hope to be able to show you some of the things we have been able to do in more detail, but in particular since January 2007 we have visibly redesigned:

• Worthing.gov.uk (this website) (May 2008)
• Adur & Worthing Council Services (July 2007)
• Aquarena Swimming Pool (August 2007)
• Fit4Worthing Scheme (March 2007)
• Highdown Gardens (February 2007)
• Visit Worthing (May 2007)
• Worthing Regeneration in partnership with TwoBelowZero Web Design (September 2007)
• Worthing Leisure Centre Kiosk (August 2007)
• Worthing Theatres (November 2007)

Our remaining websites are onstream for replacement by Q4 2008. All of these sites have been redesigned but are always in a continuous state of development particularly Worthing Borough Council's website itself as we always welcome constructive comments which help us improve the website. As such I would like to say thank you to everyone who has taken the time to write in with their comments, compliments and also complaints as this really helps us focus on the issues you raise and getting them sorted quickly.

Visit Worthing redesigned with concepts from Hunter Johnstone (May 2007)

Standards Compliance

We are striving to make all of our websites meet the following standards:

These standards are formally adopted by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and are standards for the coding of the pages, the presentation/apperance of our pages and the accessibility level of our pages.

You can read a bit more about what these mean in the Technical Accomplishments section. At the bottom of every page of our websites you can see the standards icons to which we are adhering to.

Highdown Gardens website, redesigned in February 2007

XHTML

In the beginning Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) had no inline images (pictures that are displayed on the page with the text rather than seperately.) The Mosaic web browser came along and added inline images, and other features that would eventually become the HTML 2.0 specification in 1995, which is when our web developer started making her first web pages. Many new features were added to make each vendor's web browser better than the competition until the HTML specification was wild and overgrown.

XHTML (Extensible Hypertext Markup Language) aims to solve this problem by defining a rigidly structured web document. Unfortunately, structure was greatly lacking from many of the websites Worthing Council had produced.

• We are working on having where possible all of our web pages up to the XHTML 1.0 Strict or 1.1 specification and maintaining their adherence. In some cases content is added where it is not formatted correctly which can cause that page to fail but we always bring up all pages up to speed quickly. Our standard styles are all compliant.

Accessibility

In January 2007, most of Worthing Borough Council's websites failed recognised accessibility accreditation. Even today we have a lot of work to do but we are aiming to make all of our websites accessible. But what is accessibility?

Accessibility affects everyone. Whether you wear glasses, use a braille output device, have a dyslexia condition or find computers a challenge; we can all benefit from good accessibility adherence. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) from World Wide Web Consortium (W3C, a standards committee like the British Standards Institute) specify some key ways that websites can be made easier to use for everybody, and also more enjoyable. There are three levels from A, double-A and triple-A.

• We are aiming for Double A standard at very least on all of our pages, although first we appreciate we must consistently reach and exceed the A standard before aiming for AA. This will include checking every page on our website. In the 2007/8 SOCITM 'Better Connected' report, our main council website was a marginal fail for level A as we had two pages that had the potential to cause problems for those using assistive devices.
  

Cascading Stylesheets (CSS)

Stylesheets offer an easy way to maintain and design a website. They encourage good structure and accessible design. We use stylesheets everywhere because it means keeping our websites current, up to date and redesigning becomes a much easier task rather than an arduous task.

• Every website we launched or redesigned since January 2007 has used CSS stylesheets for the actual design of the website meaning we can spend more time on the quality of the content rather than fiddling with a design that is broken.

Last Updated: July 10th 2008

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