Leicestershire County Council (LCC)
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 websites 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 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.
Web Links
- Leicestershire Villages (www.leicestershirevillages.com)
- Leicestershire Parish Councils (www.leicestershireparishcouncils.org)
- Leicestershire Statistics and Research Online (www.lsr-online.org)
- Leicestershire Forums (www.leicestershireforums.org)
- Leicestershire & Rutland Neighbourhood Watch Association (www.leicestershirenhw.com)
- North West Leicestershire Neighbourhood Watch (www.nhwleicsnorth.org)
- Leicester, Leicestershire & Rutland CVS (www.llrcvs.org.uk)
- Leicestershire's Youth Portal - The Jitty (www.thejitty.com)
Testimonials
"Having worked with Cuttlefish for a number of years, I would recommend their services very highly. A friendly and accommodating team with a great knowledge of website building and the many other aspects of being present on the Internet."
John Young, Director at Orange Hedgehog
Cuttlefish Sites
Latest News
We were very pleased to hear that the Charnwood Borough council website has been assessed in the 2009 SOCITM Better Connected survey as being one of only 13 Shire District Councils in England to have a website with "Excellent Content".
We moved CBC over to a new version of our Content Management System last year and it's great to see that the hard work, both within the council and at Cuttlefish, has paid off Well done all.
We have launched two new websites this week. The site for Procraft Design Ltd (www.procraftdesign.co.uk) is a CMS site with Flash elements. Graphic design was by our regular collaborator Jason Marriot Design.
The new Spark Children's Festival site (www.sparkfestival.co.uk) contains a full programme for the Arts Council funded annual festival, with on-line ticket purchasing.
Cuttlefish Digital Arts has launched 'Stench' a new online community aimed at digital artists and experimental performers. The website makes use of our 'cSocial' community building system and has full social network integration. Go to stench.org.uk.
Our new site for Andy Reed MP is amongst the first to make full use of the latest version of our 'sPortals' content management system. Andy is a keen user of so-called 'Web 2.0' tools and his new site integrates content from his Flickr, YouTube and Twitter pages, as well as providing him with full blogging facilities. Visit his new site at andyreedmp.org.uk
We have launched a new content managed website for insurance brokers Blythin and Brown. See their new site at blythinandbrown.co.uk.