Straight from the Hart
Centreline on the Web with Hart District Council
HART DISTRICT COUNCIL HITS THE INFORMATION SUPERHIGHWAY IN RECORD TIME WITH CENTRELINE 2000 AND WEBMANAGE. HERE'S HOW....
Hart District Council serves a varied community with a range of local services from environment and leisure to refuse collection. They also act as collection agents for council taxes. In common with local government agencies throughout England, Hart DC has recently been through the local government review process.
As Strategy Officer John Messer explains, it helped to suggest changes to the way IT is used in the Council. "One key message that came out of the review process was that we decided we could use information technology to help us to improve the level of service we provide."
Information is a public resource
"We recognise that information is a public resource, a community asset", continues Messer. "It matters not only to individuals, but also local business and voluntary groups. It matters to our parish councils (some of which are as large as town councils in their own right). In fact it is relevant for anyone who cares about the community."
The Council was and still is actively working on a number of community-based networks (most at pilot phase) but when Centreline 2000 approached the council with a proposal to use WebManage, the opportunity was too good to miss. The results have been remarkable.
Up and running inside 72 hours
"Naturally, we have a wealth of standard electronic and paper documentation already in existence. Basically, it is an A-Z of the district, key features, services and assets," comments Messer. "We provided this to Centreline and within 3 days we had a fully featured web site for the district."
"We are delighted with the way the Hart web site is developing," commented Centreline Managing Director Simon Walden. "The entire process is driven by the WebManage software. We develop a design that strikes the right balance between being visually appealing but not so graphics-heavy as to be unusable (a common problem with web sites). Then we run WebManage on the existing documentation to develop the core of the site."
"The real beauty of this approach," continues Walden, "is that WebManage works on a live document store so its easy to manage changes and modifications. As new documents are added to the store they are automatically categorised, sorted and integrated onto the web site."
Complete solution
"We wanted a complete solution. WebManage is a complete web site service, configured to our individual needs, including design, creation and management", says Messer. "That's one reason why we chose Centreline 2000. Also our IT department already knew Centreline. They were very happy with the service Centreline provides and they had the right track record. Nonetheless I was sceptical that we could get things moving so quickly."
"A web site is really an on-going publishing and marketing responsibility", he continues. "We were concerned about the real downstream costs of managing and maintaining the system. What we liked about the Centreline approach was that they were able to help us anticipate and quantify the real management costs - and WebManage has the tools to automate so much of it."
Success in minutes
As far as the future is concerned, Centreline is already working with Hart DC to make the minutes of council meetings available at their web site.
"Our IT department and Centreline have been looking at how the minutes of council meetings can be published," says Messer. "We would like to be able to offer the option for people to look up topics such as the minutes of meetings over planning applications or other environmental issues. We could also then use the web as a forum for gathering views and opinions on some of the topics under discussion. With WebManage - we have so many options for opening up communication channels within the community."
About WebManage
WebManage is a complete web site package Designed for organisations that want the benefits of a vibrant presence on the world wide web - without the headaches of setting it up and managing the system.
There are several parts to the WebManage service:
- Design and Build of Web Pages
- Full Document and Database Conversion
- On-Line Web Management
- Statistics and Audit Reporting
- Use of WebManager 2000
WebManager 2000 is our special Web server software that powers the Centreline 2000 Web site. It provides a very wide range of extensions to normal Web server capability.
Automatic Variables such as page title, page URL, date of modification and so on are all automatically inserted into web pages - this reduces maintenance overhead.
Automatic Browser Detection allows us to create one page but deliver different formats to different browsers. For example, Netscape is a highly functional browser and we can maximise the use of features such as tables, frames and Java. However, on a text only (say Lynx on Unix) browser none of these features are appropriate and so different pages are delivered.
Include Files allow sub-files to be merged into the delivered web page. For example all headers and footers on the site are inserted from a master reference. This allows us to change the look and feel of the site in minutes. Dated inclusions allow us to run the daily news service and tip of the week column without needing daily on-line updates.
A national first for Hart DC and Centreline 2000
Hart District Council now provide versions of the minutes of their council meetings at their web site, courtesy of WebManage and Centreline 2000.
"We are delighted with the results," said Strategy Officer John Messer. "The system takes on-line minutes from our proprietary system and converts them into a web translated format that is fully indexed and searchable. We believe it is vital that our community can see and understand the decision-making processes that go on. This is just one more way that people can do that."
"We believe that this is a national first," said Centreline's Stuart Hillston. "At the moment WebManage is providing an exact representation of the minutes of the meetings, but we are already looking at providing summarised reports - straight out of the existing proprietary minutes system. I am very pleased that we have been able to bring the minutes system on-line so quickly."
You can visit Hart District Council from here.
| 
