Worthing Borough Council

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Technical Details

01903 239999

enquiries@worthing.gov.uk

This is perhaps the only unashamedly 'geeky' page on this website. Mostly because we are very proud of the work we do on the web here at Worthing Borough Council. This page will talk about some of the work do for our websites and how we've done them.

Web Developer's Toolkit

As far as a toolkit goes, the current web developer's toolkit is pretty lightweight:

Notepad or Notepad++
Adobe Photoshop CS
Lots of web browsers of which Firefox 3.5 and Internet Explorer 8 are the main browsers used to develop with.

Development at the council is conducted on a Windows based system but tested also on Mac and Linux systems externally also in a range of web browsers and different fonts. Browsers we regularly test on include:

Apple Safari 2.0.4 to the current release versions
Firefox 2 and 3
Google Chrome current release versions
Internet Explorer 6[¹], 7 and 8
Opera 9.0 and 9.5

^{1 :}Internet Explorer 6 is supported but oweing to its numerous deficiencies as an eight year old product that would otherwise hold us back developing the website in ways that truly enhance the user experience. As such some aesthetics will not be correct on Internet Explorer 6 due to its bugs; but we will ensure that the website functions correctly on Internet Explorer 6.

We also test on other browsers from time to time including Firefox 1.5, Lynx, NetFront and various Gecko derivatives (the rendering engine behind Firefox) such as Camino, IceWeasel and so forth.

Externally procured products are used to manage our on-line mapping (Plan Access), search engine (Semaphore) and on-line forms (Office Forms).

Technologies Used

The main council website (www.worthing.gov.uk) runs solely on in-house developed code all except for third party statistics monitoring and JavaScript application programming interfaces (APIs.) The website is designed in such a manner as to 'fall back' gracefully with JavaScript disabled so that the site is still perfectly functional when running on non-JavaScript enabled devices or browsers.

The main JavaScript API used is jQuery on which the sidebar/gadgets subsystem is built on top of. The Sidebar and Gadgets platform was developed in house by the web developer using from-scratch code. It is not based on existing implementations such as BBC, FaceBook or London Borough of Redbridge's iRedbridge website. Likewise it does not use google-caja or Open Social as it is an 'internal system' which is only used to run internally developed gadgets. It is however extensible through XML configuration files and can easily be updated to include new gadgets which are only loaded into memory when configured to display on a user's page.

Versions of the Javascript APIs in use include:

jQuery 1.2.6
jQuery UI 1.5b

The other APIs incuding:

wbc.core.js
wbc.content.js
wbc.sidebar.js

Were developed in house at Worthing Borough Council. No external consultancy is used in designing and coding our websites.

The current version of this website is release 3, we are not in beta and unlike so many Web 2.0 companies/websites like to advertise, being beta isn't cool. It's just annoying for end users when the excuse for something not working is that the website is in the testing stage, rather than the truth that proper testing hasn't been done in the first place! We're here to improve and get better, not shrug off things that aren't right.

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