Reply: The beauty of people being able to openly comment/criticise on this website now and websites in general to be easily improved great. What isn't great is us sending you around in circles because something was more difficult than needed.

Looking at what we had done with 'fresh eyes' I can see what you mean. I have made a number of further improvements to this:

• There are now clear links on the Planning and Building Control homepage with the Planning Application search area having an alternative link to search by address
• The Applications page has been improved further too. I have added the Search by Address links below the Search by Reference Number area. The reference number is used by a lot of people who get the planning application letters in the post so we don't want to remove this or demote its use.
  
  I have also improved the wording a lot more after some careful thought of making it less confusing.
• The View, Comment and Decisions on an Application page has been massively improved in terms of wording. It was a bit confusing to look at and wasn't very helpful in some parts. Now there are friendlier heading names that actually mean something!

I think it's important to say that a lot of people have found the Planning section to be improved quite a lot, but that's not to say we can't improve further which is what we have done again today. We do look at other councils (in fact every one in the UK at one time or another) and there are a lot of good ideas out there, but also some we want to stay away from. I have forwarded Arun District's example back to our Planning section as it is quite good and it is what we are aiming to achieve in terms of use simple language and being orientated around the tasks people have.

If you do read this (I hope you do) and others as well have further ideas we would welcome constructive criticism. You can also e-mail me directly.

Reply: That is really annoying. I have checked all the links this morning and they all work. I have fixed a number of West Sussex County Council's links recently (they have moved things around) but these all seem fine. It may have been there was either maintenance work or some problems on West Sussex County Council's website.

Are they working for other people? Let us know about any broken link you find and we will get it fixed.

Reply: Consider it done! The postcode is available from the contact information available from the big contact information link at the bottom of the page for most services but as you say, on the page itself is really handy. Thanks for the idea.

Reply: The events are organised by month in the navigation on the left. There also further links to local attractions in the area, major events in the year ahead, the Museum and Art Gallery's events and so forth.

If you visit any section on this website, its subsections are always available from the left hand Navigation. I hope this helps.

Reply: No worries, if you do find anything that isn't helpful, missing, broken, difficult to understand just get back in touch. Thanks to everybody's feedback and criticism it is paying off because last month (October 2008) survey responses from you, the public, rated us at having the highest overall net satisfaction rate! Let's hope we can continue to improve even from this high level.

Reply: I think this is partly a misreading of what the form page said to you and a not overly clear message from the form page. What the form was saying is that your response had been e-mailed to us, not you. I have changed the wording to meet our current standard which is to confirm that we have received your information successfully.

I hope this clarifies this for you.

Reply: That's quite OK. Not sure about the genius part mind! I still have some tweaking to do on the overall contact information setup but when we launched the new site it was very important to make sure that the contact information was all in the same format, had as much relevant information as possible so that you didn't need to look elsewhere.

Reply: From my investigations here I can only assume you searched either for Worthing Theatres or similar in the search engine. Technically what it pulled out was very correct as the words matched both those on the Cinemas and Theatres Licensing page as well as the link to the Theatres website page (the Leisure and Culture homepage) - but because the results are sorted by the closest match, and then alphabetically, the Cinemas and Theatres Licensing page was the 1st link. So technically the computer was right, but with human intelligence we could say that actually most people are interested in the Worthing Theatres website, not the licensing page. Sadly with our search engine we can give it this intelligence, nor force it to put Worthing Theatres first. But I am working on it and hope to fix it.

Other ways of getting to the Theatres website is to use the Theatres quick link at the top of every page below the Worthing Borough Council logo or also on the homepage is a link to Worthing Theatres in the "Our Other Websites" section of the page. There is also the A to Z Index which can really help you pinpoint precise information.