Website development

How we continuously improve our site to make it easy to use and to meet the needs of as many people as possible. Includes information on improvements we have made, future work and how you can help us.

How we are continuously improving and developing our Westmorland and Furness Council website.

Website development 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

We have been working to 'migrate' content from these legacy sites to the main Westmorland and Furness website.

Over the last three years we have taken a diligent and considered approach to this project, so that no customers are disadvantaged or left in a situation where they can't find information online.

At September 2026, the majority of content is on the Westmorland and Furness website. There are a couple of services, like parts of licensing and housing, that for operational and technical reasons still have a small amounts of content on the old legacy council websites.

The Cumbria County Council site has been decommissioned. The Barrow, Eden and  South Lakeland web sites still exist so that customers that were used to going to them can still find the information and services they need - but they are redirected to the Westmorland and Furness website. 

We are now in the process of actively decommissioning the Barrow, Eden and Southlakeland sites council sites. From October 2026 we will start deleting pages from these old sites.

Benefits of the new website

The technology behind the new website is very versatile and accessible. Using it means more people will be able to easily find and use our services online.

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 and reduce the costs of developing our site.

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

We constantly work to make the site content clearer, more accessible and easier to use. 

We use feedback from our customers, monitor website usage data and keep up to date with the latest thinking and technology to continuously improve the site for the people who use it.

Below are some examples of improvements we have made to our site.

Moving away from PDF's

July 2026. PDF's can be very hard for people to use online. They're designed for print so aren't flexible enough to work on different devices, like mobile phones, and their layout can make them very hard to navigate.

They're especially difficult for the one in five people who may have a disability or other issues that make it harder for them to navigate documents online. PDFs can exclude people from finding the information or services they need independently.

Over the last six months we've been working with our colleagues at LocalGov Drupal on adopting a new technology called LocalGov Drupal Publications.

Publications allow us to present documents, like strategies or policies in a way that people can easily search, read and find them using any device.

An example of a publications document on the website is our 'Data protection policy'.

We are working on the next iteration of Publications, which will allow us to add images in an accessible way.

Accessibility audit

May 2026. We want our website to be easy to use so that as many people as possible can do things online themselves and independently. This includes things like writing in plain English, or ensuring the colours and colour contrasts we use make things easy to see, through to more technical things like making sure you can still use the site if you can't use a mouse.

Every year we do a comprehensive accessibility audit of our website.to make sure we comply with the law and are achieving really high standards of accessibility. We back that up with a monthly update and review of issues and weekly monitoring of our accessibility scores.

We publish, and continuously monitor and update our accessibility statement.

Currently we have a very high accessibility score in the region of 95%, making our amongst the most accessible government sites in the UK.

Usability and accessibility are really important to us. A high standard of accessibility makes our site easier for everyone to use.

March 2026. More and more people are using AI search results to get the answers they need, to the extent that people might not even visit our website, they just read the AI search result. But it's a new technology and search results returned by AI can be inaccurate.

We need to understand how to optimise our web content so search results and the information in them is right and can be trusted.

You only have to see the news to know that this a really fast-paced thing, AI search and best practise for working with it is changing, almost daily.

We have put together a working group to explore, monitor and advise on AI search. Things we've already discovered and implemented include:

  • AI searches deep within our websites, it can find old out of date PDF's or content and present the information as though it's valid. We are working on reducing the number of PDF's held in our website's media library
  • well structured content is really important. This is good because we have worked hard to ensure our website content follows recognised best practise. How we do that is set out in our Design and content guidelines.

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 on a 'show more services' link to see them all. Our data showed that many people were consistently clicking the link to find the service they were looking for.

We redesigned the home page so that it shows all the services we deliver in one view.

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.

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.

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.

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.