We are developing a website for the new unitary Westmorland and Furness Council.
Project overview
Originally a lot of web content sat on the websites of the former authorities that make up Westmorland and Furness Council:
- Barrow Borough Council
- Cumbria County Council
- Eden District Council
- South Lakeland District Council
Over the last year we have been working to 'migrate' content from these legacy sites to the main Westmorland and Furness website.
We have done this so people can find information and do the tasks they need to do more easily, in one place.
At November 2024, around 80% of our content has been moved.
You can find all the information you need by searching the Westmorland and Furness site, however around 20% of pages will still link back to the old council websites.
Once content has been migrated to the new site, and only when we're sure that it is findable, we will remove content from the old 'legacy' council sites.
Benefits of the new website
The technology behind the new website is very versatile and accessible. It is used by many other councils sharing resource and knowledge through the LocalGov Drupal scheme.
This allows us to access a community of developers and designers and to share ideas across other councils.
It also allows us to create things like directories, which is a great way to show services that have a number of sites - for example, find a car park near you.
Changes we have made
Since your new council was formed we have worked to make the site content clearer, more accessible and easier to use.
We have designed and delivered a new website and used some of the new features it offers us.
Content that we have moved from the old sites to the new site includes:
- Benefits and financial help
- Bins recycling and street cleaning
- Births, deaths, marriages and ceremonies
- Council Tax
- Health and social care
- Libraries and archives
- Parking, streets and transport
- Parks, culture and leisure
- Planning
- Schools and education
- Voting and elections
- Your council
The remaining service areas we are working on now, or next, are:
- Business and licensing
- Housing
How you can help
You can help us by giving us feedback on our website and web content, use the feedback form at the bottom of this page.
Things we have done based on your feedback
Below are some of the recent updates we have made to our site in response to your feedback and our analysis of web usage data.
Improved map pin locations
August 2025. Our feedback and analytics data showed that people were finding it difficult to find the locations of venues marked on a map with a pin, where there were lots of them in the same place. For example the pins showing the thirteen car parks in Kendal were overlapping one another and hard to see.
This was also an accessibility issue that made it even more difficult for people who use assistive technology to use tour website.
We worked with our developers to create 'clustered map pins'. Now you will see one map pin that indicates that there are thirteen car parks in Kendal. As you zoom in they separate out in to the individual pins, but never overlap one and other.
For an example take a look at our 'Find a car park near you' web page.
Improved search filters
August 2025. We noticed that people were having difficulty operating filters on our directory searches, for example on our 'Warm spots' web page.
There were two issues:
- the filters were showing as a long list on mobile devices making it difficult to scroll past
- each time a user clicked a filter the page would refresh, making it difficult to use if you wanted to select multiple features
We worked with our developers to implement:
- a collapsible format, so the long list of filters is hidden unless you need it
- a system that allows you to select multiple filters and search for them
New look home page
June 2025. Over the last year we have monitored how people used our home page using our web site analytics, and heat maps.
The site originally only showed a selection of services, users had to click o a show more services link to see them all. Our data showed that many people were consistently clicking the link to find he service they were looking for.
We redesigned the home page so that it shows all the services we deliver in one view.
Cookie-less tracking
May 2025. To help make the site less intrusive we adopted an alternative to traditional cookie control that stores no information on our customers personal devices.
Using this method there is no way that we can track any information about individual users and their interaction with our site.
The added benefit is that we have improved the accuracy of our data, in terms of volume usage, enabling us to make more accurate decisions about website development.
New site search
April 2025. You said that the site search wasn't reliable. So we wanted to find a way to improve the quality of search results and the user experience of using the search on the site.
Based on an analysis of our web usage data and data insights from Google Search Console we trialled Google Programmable Search Engine on our development website. Our testing showed impressive improvements in the way search works and the results that were returned.
We have implemented the new search engine on our main site and are 'beta' testing it. We'd welcome your feedback, just use the link at the bottom of this page.
Improvements include:
- It will interpret search strings or question type searches like 'what's my bin day in Kendal?'
- It will interpret misspelling and find the best result, like 'who is my clclr'
- We can prioritise searches in relation to key information
- We can instruct it to search other sites, for example our committee and meetings information in mod.gov
We have other improvements in the pipeline, the search will continue to be developed and improved.
Better information about search
December 2024. We could see from our analytics and feedback that people weren't always finding what they wanted using the site search.
We decided to conduct more detailed research so that:
- we could more fully understand the issue
- we could make informed decisions about the options for improving the site search
To give us better data we implemented Google Search Console.
Improving searches
September 2024. We regularly check our website analytics to see what search terms people are using on our site.
If those search terms aren't finding relevant content we work on the site to improve them.
Recently we improved searches for related to 'cost of living'.
Bin collection service alerts
May 2024. Sometimes we might not have collected your bin because of issues like flooding, snow and ice, a blocked road or a vehicle breakdown.
Before you report a missed bin you can now check to see if we already know about the issue and are planning to come back to you by looking at our service status updates.
Contacting us
April 2024. You told us that it was hard to find out how to contact us, if you couldn't find what you needed on our website.
We improved our search so that terms like 'contact' or 'telephone' would take you to the 'Contact us' page of the website.
We also added a 'Contact us' link in the footer of out site, so you can find our contact details from wherever you are on our site.
Bin collection calendar
March 2024. We are trialing a new way to find information about your bin collection dates on our 'Check your bin collection day' web page.
Currently this service is being tested in the Barrow and Southlakeland areas. We're working on extending it to the Eden area.
Place names
December 2023. You pointed out that some towns and villages can be hard to find from our mapping. For example the map search in our directories doesn't recognise 'Barrow', but does recognise 'Barrow-in-Furness'.
As a temporary measure we have added some information and instructions to relevant pages about how to search for places like Barrow, or Dalton.
We are working with our developers to come up with a solution to improve the map search.
Corrected location of facilities
December 2023. You pointed out that some of the locations on our directory mapping pins were wrong. For example on our 'Find a library near you' directory.
We investigated and found that the automatic mapping function was placing pins in the centre of a postcode rather than on the exact site.
We went through every one of our directory pages, checked the given locations and corrected them where they were wrong.
Mapping symbols
October 2023. You said it was difficult to understand the symbols on some of the road works mapping.
We added instructions on how to mouse over symbols to see what they mean.
We are also considering adding a map key for people who may have difficulty using a mouse or who are using a mobile phone.