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.
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:
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:
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)
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
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.
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.
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.
Last Updated: July 10th 2008
By sharing just a few words on how useful this page was, what was good, what was missing or confusing can really help us improve our website. Send a quick message to the web developer and your feedback will be used to improve this page. Do not use this form to lodge complaints or comments that need feedback.