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 updates we have recently made to our site in response to your feedback.
Site search
We wanted to improve the quality of search results and the user experience of using the search on the site.
We recently 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.
Improving searches
We regularly check our website analytics and our Google Search Console 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
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
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
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
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
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
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.