Worthing Borough Council

I will see what I can find out and hope we can have a feature about this as I think it could be quite useful.

Good question. I have asked and hope to have an answer soon. When I have it I'll put the opening hours on the website.

Your question has also raised the need to tidy up the Skatepark Pages and perhaps get some new photos too and some new things going on there so watch this space for many reasons!

We have updated this page with the latest information. We have also got a more thorough answer from the Parks Department:

"I don't believe that there are any plans to reinstate the Pond in Denton Gardens, so this information should be removed from the Web site. The Council's financial position and constant vandalism to this feature in the past and the other pond in Marine Gardens make it impractical to repair it."

Done. I have also added it to our Recruitment Service Standards page.

Thank you. I have now raised this with Planning so that they can get our supplier on as to why this is not working. I'm also hopeful that the Planning On-line page will be updated with availability of the service (i.e saying it is down at the moment) as well as making a friendlier 'error' message as the current one isn't up to my standards by a long stretch of the imagination.

In the meantime, recent planning applications sent to the council are always available from our Applications Registered (Weekly List) pages. Apologies for the downtime on this service, I hope we can resolve it as soon as possible.

I'm going have to take a guess at how this difficulty has arisen, would I be right in saying you clicked Transport Planning under T in the A to Z Index?

If this is indeed the case, I have checked our entry for Transport Planning on the A to Z Index and indeed there is a problem there, I will replace this now with two seperate links, one for Transport Planning Policy and Transport in Worthing as they are very different topics. I am always working on the A to Z Index so this will rapidly improve. The clearer we can make our A to Z Index the better, we do test with external users but inevitably when open to a huge audience such as this website has, there will be a few things that we won't know about until they are fed back as you have very helpfully done in this case.

As to navigation, the website is different from before but for the vast majority they are finding it a lot easier. To find out where you are at any time, look at the You Are Here bar (at the top of each page) which shows you your way back to the home page.

On the left hand side you have all of the sub-pages (if there are any) from where you currently are.

Finally as to the page displaying with the box half off the page, it is likely you are using 800 by 600. As with the BBC we took a decision that to continue supporting 800x600 would be incredibly limiting to our ability to deliver a forward looking website. Our statistics showed for April 2008 that only 4% of visitors used that resolution. This is the likely reason for things spilling over the edge horizontally. I am also working on trying to ease this problem but 95% of our visitors are using a screen size that is suitable and feedback has been incredibly favourable. I will be doing what I can to improve this.

If the problem is unrelated to your screen's resolution then it is possible despite being tested on hundreds of computers and different platfoms that you have a seperate problem entirely which we need to investigate much more thoroughly.

Thank you. 2-3 people have so far commented that they have had some difficulties and I do take these on board and will work to address the issues raised, but it's also reassuring that a huge majority so far are very much in favour of what we have done so far. It is important to know where we go wrong but from time to time it's nice to know that we're not getting it wrong (our user testing was universally in favour of the new website.) As regards to being open and honest on this page, we just wanted to show that this website really is worked on every day of the week and we are continually looking to improve.

I believe that we can look at the wording on this page to improve it. However it appears you are trying to click on a screenshot picture of the gadget, not the actual thing which is on the homepage (www.worthing.gov.uk) in the top right - you will see the Recycling and Refuse Days gadget. So far we have had no one with the same problem so far with the gadget not being 'active'. Gadgets are always on the far right hand side of the page. Simply enter the street or part of its name there and if there is only one match, it will show that street, if there is more than one match it will ask you which one is the one you want.

I will improve the wording of the guide and make it clear that the pictures of the gadget are indeed just that.

Also have you looked at using the A to Z Index? There are lots of references in there for example for Bin - Collection Days, Rubbish - Collection Days, Dustbin - Collection Days and so forth - these will let you search for your collection day on a standard web form. Hopefully this will help you out.

I'm surprised by this as I am an Ubuntu user at home (in fact it's my main operating system) and also use Firefox. As there are no further details as to what doesn't work, I can only assume you mean the website in general.

I can definitely say it does work as much of the coding/design work was done within Ubuntu 7.10. Over the weekend I tested as far back as Ubuntu 6.10, 7.04 and 7.10 which worked fine. I am aware that Ubuntu 8.04 released two months ago, came with Firefox 3.0 Beta 5 and though I've not yet upgraded to 8.04, this is the only reason I can think of something not working in Ubuntu as the release of Firefox 3 that came with 8.04 is beta (i.e. testing software) grade. I do run Firefox 3.0 release candidate 2 at home (albeit on Mac OS X and Windows XP) which does also work fine.

As such I definitely know this website works on Ubuntu and GNU/Linux + Firefox 1.5/2 in general, if you could be more specific of what doesn't work it would really help as my thorough testing has shown Ubuntu to not have a single glitch with Firefox 2.

We only support final version web browsers as it would be impossible to also support beta release browsers which inherretly have flaws. This is one of my major gripes with Ubuntu that is has a worrying tendency to include beta/release candidate software in final releases, I believe The GIMP in 7.10 was a release candidate too. Certainly any websites the council has designed/programmed since January 2007 most certainly aren't "Internet Explorer + Windows" only (although third party systems such as Planning On-line are, but these were implemented at a time when Internet Explorer had 95% of the market wrapped up.)

If you could contact me with further details, I would be most grateful.

Thank you for the kinds words. I was speaking with planning this morning and we hope to tweak these pages but I think we have a good formula here. Your feedback (and many others) appears to confirm this.

I'll go out on a limb here and suggest that you're looking at one of the help pages for our Discover Worthing mapping service. (If you look at the You Are Here: bar at the top of the page you will see you are in the Help pages of Discover Worthing Mapping.

Instead, use our A to Z Index and choose D for Discover Worthing, M for Maps for example that will take you to the main maps page which has a direct link into our Discover Worthing service. You could also look in our Do It On-line section (which we have some major improvements in progress) and choose On-line Mapping.

We will be looking to improve the wording in this section quite heavily as it could be made clearer over the coming weeks. One of the main reasons you have to go via the main Discover Worthing maps page is that you have to be aware of the terms and conditions of the service's use. Discover Worthing definitely works in Internet Explorer 7.

I hope this helps, if you are still having problems please contact me.

Unfortunately this really does not help us at all - an application form for what? We're here to help correct and add the things that are missing, this has included opening hours of various places (Homefield Skate Park, Cemeteries, Parking Shop for example), location maps (again Cemeteries), boat mooring information (we're working on it) and improving information (Local Housing Allowance for example.)

This comment doesn't tell us what the application form you are looking for and as much as I want to be able to help, I need to know more to do so -- please be explicit (though not in language, thanks) as to:

• Exactly what you found good and/or,
• Exactly what was not there and/or,
• Exactly what you couldn't find.

In this case I can only guess it's an application form either for planning applications or perhaps you have come to Worthing Borough Council's website to apply for a job at Tescos supermarkets. In the case of a Planning Application Form, if you use our A to Z Index, there is an option under P for Planning - Make a Planning Application and Planning - Apply for Planning Permission. This takes you to the Planning homepage which links to the Government's Planning Portal where you can submit a planning application form on-line. Alternatively you can follow the links to our Planning and Building Control Forms page where it says you can download (and then print and fill in) the forms to send to us via post or to drop them into us.

If you want to apply for a job at Tescos, we recommend looking at www.tesco.co.uk.

If neither of these are what you were looking for, we would be very happy to help you if you can tell us what the application form is for, you can e-mail me on webmaster@worthing.gov.uk -- we're here to help and improve.

I agree, not very useful. I have some useful childcare related links to put together so I'll work with Leisure and Cultural Services to put together a page as the Aquarena has creche facilities, and then there are the Summer Fun programmes we also run. There is a lot more we could have available to help you here. I'm on the case for you and others!

Utterly agree. I can assure you I am working very closely with Planning and the vendor of the Planning On-line system to sort this out. Firstly, I want a proper 'problem' page which has very useful links to at least let you know where to find current applications on our website (they're on the Applications Registered (Weekly List) page) and secondly a decent on-line form which you can fill in to comment on planning application notices you may have received or seen. You can always send these to planning@worthing.gov.uk in the meantime. I am dependent on the vendor co-operating and working on this with the degree of priority it deservers (high basically) but I am on the case to sort this hopefully this week.

Thank you. Photography is one of my passions and I was very kean to act on the survey comments that we didn't have enough photos of Worthing on the website! So we're working to sort that out. But better still, the people who live, visit and work in Worthing also take very good photos of the area and I felt it was a good idea to hand this part of the front page over to the public. The thing is, I don't mind if you take the photo with a disposable camera or an expensive digital camera, it's the subject. The more people that get on board the better too. So if you have photos of Worthing, please visit our A View of Worthing page for more details of how to enter, it's dead easy!

I would say that the page will be out of date because it's in the news archive section, which we restored due to people finding some older articles useful. Unfortunately the downside is that some people also get 'scuppered' by it being there, as an archive section, some of the content will by its nature be out of date.

Instead, you are better off using our A to Z Index, choosing N for Nordic Walking and that will take you to the current programme which has just finished (about 5 days ago) and I know this page is in the process of being updated. This is the best way to get up to date information.

I do appreciate however our search engine has dated all of the news archive entries as 17th June 2008 because it was yesterday that I finished reformatting the hundreds of articles (a job not to be envied!) -- this is a pain, and something I can't easily resolve as it's rooted in the way computers mark the date of things as technically they were put on yesterday.

You're dead right. For some reason the form link isn't there. I'm very sorry about that. I have now corrected this. I only wish this was right in the first place.