Birmingham: It’s Not Shit

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Visitors to the council website at the moment (at least those on Internet Explorer who don’t have a pop-up blocker, sheesh, click here to take the survey if you don’t use the buggy piece of arseware) are being asked to fill in a survey about their web-use and how they’d improve the site. If you manage to get in you’ll be told that the survey is anonymous, then asked for your postcode(!), which would narrow you down to about 50 people.

It’s a good idea to do a survey about what people want from the Council website (it’d be an even better idea if all web users could fill it in) - although I was under the impression that the redesign was some way along the process, so let’s hope there’s time for the results to filter in.

It’s an odd survey, it seems obsessed with the idea of video, personalised homepages and audi0 (and for some reason scrobbling*) - and doesn’t really ask what you want straight-out.

It asks if you go on insurance sites more than once a week - who the hell does that?

Stop me if I’m wrong. but what we want from a council website is INFORMATION, not tacked on social features. As the current jargon has it “don’t try to host conversation, link to it”.

I urge you all to go and do the survey, and if you use RSS as good blog readers should, tell them - as they don’t mention it and to do a new site without it…(words fail).

*turns out to be automatically uploading iTunes data to Last.fm, why do they care?

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