Worthing Borough Council

Reply: They are mentioned but we don't have any on-line forms for housing, yet. But we will. The text at the top of the page appears on every forms page and whilst I could remove it individually for those sections that don't have them at the moment, I've not felt it necessary and it allows me to spend time on more urgent things. However, if anybody does find this confusing as it stands please drop me an e-mail on webmaster@worthing.gov.uk and I'll look at taking action where needed.

Reply: I'm glad you was able to get answers to your questions on the website, that's what we're here for.

Reply: Seems like a good idea to me. I have forwarded this on to our Leisure and Culture team to see if we can set this up as it makes sense to me. Thanks!

Reply: Thanks for reporting this. I have tested the form here, at home and on a few other computers and it's downloading OK. Is anybody else having trouble? With PDFs I recommend right clicking on the PDF link and selecting Save As as sometimes there can be problems when clicking on it to open it in the web browser. If you are having problems with this can you please drop me an e-mail to webmaster@worthing.gov.uk -- we would like to solve this if it's a problem elsewhere.

Reply: You are right there should be more detail and costs too if they're available/applicable. For this reason, we had a meeting about sorting out our event listings last Friday and it was very useful. Everyone bemoans meetings but this was a really useful one. What we will start doing is putting more information about events on-line, present it in a more usable format, and generally make the listings more helpful for everybody out there. Part of the problem has been that events have had to be entered on to a number of systems before now due to the different layouts people wanted, and this meant in some cases entering event information in up to 5 places!

Not good. So instead we will be making the website work better for all these needs which means more time can be spent putting more complete information on-line with the time saved. You should see the results of this by early November.

Reply: Thanks for your kind words. By all means share our website with others, I'm always happy to answer queries from anybody and share ideas. I'm not sure it's perfect myself, not yet at least though I am working on it. As for whether she, the web developer would consider moving to Cranbrook, well I'm quite happy in Worthing. :) But maybe some day I'll visit, it's been a few years since I travelled to the USA and Canada!

Reply: Thanks! I think that could be a good idea, I do need to style the payments page to look like the rest of the website as at the moment it's a bit ungainly looking and doesn't integrate smoothly with the rest of the website. But once that is done I think we could try this one-click idea out.

Reply: I have e-mailed Democratic Services to find out what we can do for 2008/09's details but I have a feeling these haven't been published yet and might not be until next year. I shall post the answer here when I have it. I'm glad the page was useful, we're also putting the councillor's expense details on each of their profiles too between now and November.

Reply: The best way to find what you need on our website is to use our A to Z Index. Under P for Planning for example there is an entry for Planning - Fees. Also if you click on Planning at the top of every page in the Quick Links you can choose 'Fees' from the navigation on the left of the Planning homepage. We will be making some big improvements to the A to Z in the next two weeks which will hopefully make things clearer than they are now.

The forms page you was on is for forms to fill in either on-line or send back to us, rather than PDFs that contain information. The page you wanted is here: Fees

Reply: Good point. I have requested these to be put on-line and hope they will be soon too. We are also looking to put the air quality monitoring site locations on our Discover Worthing mapping system soon too.

Reply: Thanks, I have passed this on to our Parks people for them to comment on, I will put the reply here as soon as I have it.

Reply: Many thanks! We have now added this to our news feed.

Reply: I checked for typos and corrected those. I've also updated the page to reflect the current situation a little and requested a formal update to this page  from the senior management too.

Reply: I'm just glad the website helped rather than adding to frustration. We are trying, all we need is constructive criticism or good ideas where we're not up to speed and we can do a lot to improve things.

Reply: Thanks, that's what we're aiming for across the board.

Reply: A good point and an excellent idea. I have passed your idea on to Community Safety and whilst they are very busy right now we are looking at getting something like this done as soon as possible. Many thanks for sharing this with us! I'm sure others will value this when we get it on-line.

Reply: Thanks! I have passed your kind words on to our Planning team. I'm glad you found your visit a pleasant one and a successful one.

Reply: You know what, that's a great idea. I also have plans to do something similar for Highdown Gardens. In terms of when I can get this done for, it will be a little while yet. My first priority is trying to get everything on this website up to date, up to scratch and making sure it's helpful. I would imagine that I will be able to get this started in January once I have finshed tackling the remaining core issues with this website. (A to Z Index improvements, contact information, Your Council section being easier to understand and Housing information.) Thanks!

Reply: That's a good idea. I have asked our mapping people as well as Planning to see if we can get this information on to our searchable mapping system to display this information. This is in progress but as there is a lot of data it may take a while but we hope to have this available soon. Thanks for the good idea!

Reply: Despite past troubles with this system earlier this year, it wasn't broken. The problem was according to your comment you were possibly looking to lodge a comment at around 4.15am on a Tuesday and as the introduction page and 'Ooops' error page states on Monday to Thursday the service is unavailable from 11pm to 5.30am so we can back up all the information on our systems to make sure everything is safe. The service should be available from:

• Monday to Thursday: 5.30am to 11.00pm
• Friday to Sunday: 10.00am to 11.00pm

Hope this helps.

Sorry about that. At the time we couldn't find an e-mail address for the Highways Southern Area Office so we put the details we knew of. Since then an e-mail address has appeared on West Sussex County Council's website and I have now added that. We are due to review contact information that isn't our own in November but as this was flagged up before we have updated this page now.

As for what happened to the paperless society, hopefully on the whole you will see that a lot of work goes into this website in offering on-line facilities so reducing paperwork and the carbon footprint is very much a driving force behind putting many services and contact options on-line. We will continue to listen and always try to do better.

Thank you for taking the time to get in touch as well, it's nice to hear that we are helping people. This seems to be the case also according to our survey results where currently we have more satisfied users than the vast majority of councils. That said, we accept sometimes things aren't up to scratch so it's very helpful to hear useful criticism where we need to improve things on our website.

I can look at increasing the room in the comments box certainly.

Reply: You can respond to the consultation. The introduction sets out the background to the playground scheme and at the bottom is the link to the consultation itself.

Here is a direct link to the form: Goring Greensward Playground

Reply: Unfortunately due to an editorial error, the wrong address was given. I have been assured in the future all web links in Vibe Magazine will be put to myself first before being approved for publication. The problem is that an e-mail address was given, not a web link. Had you written an e-mail to the address given we set up an automatic response to point you in the right place, hopefully this has helped a couple of people. Even so, the mistake is not what anybody wanted.

All of our consultations can be found on the Consultations page and there has been a link to our current consultations on the homepage (you may have to scroll down as we can't pack everything into the top of the page) -- hopefully you will read this (as will others) and be able to complete the Cycling on the Promenade consultation.

Anything big like this will has been on the homepage, is now and will continue to be in the future. Also, thanks for your perseverance and taking the time to tell us your frustrations.

Reply: Thank you for the correction, this has now been corrected.

Reply: Thanks! We really want to be able to do more of this kind of thing and it was a guiding aim with the new website that this was your council's website. It might seem like an exercise in political correctness or some frothy vague 'thing' but it does matter to us that this website is useful to our residents, businesses and visitors. That's why I am personally disappointed when we haven't got something right and we have much work to do yet! I will increase the space to comment on the Goring Greensward consultation as it is a bit small.

Reply: No worries as one of my old workmates used to say! I'm still awaiting some maps from the Crematorium so people can make sense of the information the tool will give you back (otherwise a random assortment of numbers might be more confusing than helpful!) -- fingers crossed we will see something in the next week or two. Also thanks again for the suggestion!