Leicestershire County Council
Easy-To-Use Community Web Sites
Leicestershire County Council (originally through the Leicestershire Rural Partnership) was one of our first clients. Over the past 3 years the relationship has seen the development of a number of community-oriented Web sites for the people of Leicestershire.
The first was Leicestershire Villages, a set of self-managed Web sites for all villages in Leicestershire. Then followed Leicestershire Parish Councils, North West Leicestershire Neighbourhood Watch, sites for Leicestershire volunteer bureaus and, more recently, The Jitty for young people in the county.
All of the sites make use of the 'CommunityPortals' system. This was developed by Cuttlefish for the Council with the specific goal of making the construction of self-managed community sites faster and easier.
Registered users of the sites are able to post to notice boards, edit Web pages, create picture and multimedia galleries and manage on-line communities, all via a Web-based interface. Cuttlefish has been involved in helping to train hundreds of these users through workshops and presentations.
Recent enhancements to the sites include interaction with the Council's XML-based Web Services, such as the Infolinx community database and Magnet mapping system. These enhancements can be seen in the Find My Nearest extension to Leicestershire Villages in which sophisticated XML functionality his successfully hidden behind a simple-to-use interface.
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Cuttlefish Sites
Latest News
Cuttlefish Multimedia Ltd has joined forces with Leicester and London media company Channel 2020 to form Calico Interactive Ltd - a new company specialising in Internet video and social networking.
Cuttlefish's Sean Clark, a Director of the new company says, "This is a really exciting time for us. Cuttlefish has been developing Internet technologies for over five years and this new working relationship gives us the opportunity to apply our expertise to completely new business sectors."
He adds, "We identified social networking and Internet video as potential growth areas for us about two years ago and we've invested a lot of effort in ensuring that our content management tools support them."
The first applications of this new technology were the Nintendo Life, ClickOnGolf and OnlineClassroom sites, plus the new Pineapster 2.0 music community.
Cuttlefish Multimedia will continue to run alongside the new company, with existing and new Cuttlefish clients benefiting from the extra resources and expertise that Calico will make available.