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.

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