There is a perception that the County Council is overstaffed by bureaucrats, and this view is often reinforced by the way we express ourselves. I’ve written recently about jargon words and phrases often used by local government staff in publications or on websites, but not understood by the public.
Writing for the web requires a more concise and basic form of writing… plain English. Indeed the style of writing web content might also make reports and publications more accessible!
Here’s is the challenge for this week. Below is a Hantsweb page about Corporate Strategy… your mission should you accept, is to rewrite this in a more user friendly way. Post your versions in the comments box. Remember the fewer words the better, and meaningful short phrases or sentences. It’s 323 words… you’ll need to reduce it by at least half! And, of course, I will also give my version in a few days time.
Corporate Strategy of Hampshire County Council
Welcome to Hampshire County Council’s Corporate Strategy. These pages set out clear improvement priorities and targets looking foward and progress and performance looking back. The site is intended to inform the public, staff, Members, partner organisations, inspectorates and central government.
These pages aim to do two main things:
Set out the Council’s priorities to address the needs and aspirations of Hampshire’s residents
Provide an annual report of the Council’s overall performance in 2007/08
Hampshire County Council is a top performing authority, rated as ‘four star’ through the CPA process by government. Our ambition is to keep it that way, while we continually improve our performance in the interests of the communities we serve.
Looking after Hampshire, our job is to ensure the county is safe and secure and to work towards enhancing the County’s quality of place. Looking out for our residents, we want to work with them to feel safe and secure and maximise their wellbeing. Our aim is to lead and work in partnership with other organisations to remove barriers and improve choices whilst encouraging people to make their own decisions on the way they access services.
Our priorities are:
- Hampshire safer and more secure for all
- Maximising wellbeing
- Enhancing our quality of place
These three priorities are designed to reflect the political vision and direction of our publicly elected councillors and give a clear statement of what the Hampshire community can expect in terms of service delivery and the focus of our work as a local authority.
The way in which we aim to work is encompassed in “Driving Success” – Hampshire County Council’s Performance Management Framework.
We measure and monitor our performance against these priorities and progress reports can be found within these pages. You can also see national performance targets and results which are used to compare our performance with other local authorities.
These pages also constitute our Best Value Performance Plan.
I’m a naturally modest and unassuming person, so it may come as a surprise to you if I say that I believe that the CCRA website is probably the biggest and the best local government website for cultural heritage in the UK.
It’s come a long way since our first pages appeared over 11 years ago. Most recently the new corporate design has allowed a good degree of creativity to make our content stand out. But with your assistance the web team have managed to create a really useful set of over 4,000 web pages.
The better the website, the better it helps our customers to make the very best use of our services.
I am not so big headed to recognise that the website is not perfect, and even if it was today, things change and it might no longer be OK tomorrow… that’s why we rely on you to help us keep it up to date with your news and information about additions or changes to services.
So here’s the ‘challenge’…
I’d like you, CCRA staff, to go out and see if you can find better local government (District or County council) websites for libraries, museums, countryside, arts, archives and all the other services we provide.
If you can, please post links to them in the comments box on this blog, explaining what you’ve found and why you think it improves on what we do on the CCRA website. Then together we can make our bit of Hantsweb even better!
If we hear nothing back from you we’ll assume we already are the best!
There are words and phrases that many of you use when writing content to go on the web or for email newletters that really, really annoy me. These are the ones intended to link to other pages or websites.
The phrase that creates the most tension in me is the one which starts ‘Click here for…’ If I can explain that it is implicit in the blue underline that shows a link, that if you click on it you will be taken to somewhere else… so there is absolutely no reason the use the ’click’ word.
Here are some more examples
- Visit the XYZ website for more info
- For further details please follow this link
- For more information go to our website
- If you would like further details…
- Please visit www.xyz.co.uk for more information
- Visit our website site for more information
- For more information logon to our website
These could more elegantly be expressed ‘Futher information” or “More information”, or if some explanation is needed ”Further information on the subject” and linked out to the relevent content.
- For an application form and further details visit our website
All that’s required is Application and further details to be linked as a stand alone.
Where possible links should be built into the natural flow of the sentence rather than an add-on instruction.
One of the ways to measure the use of a website is the rather heavy handed count of the number of people or pages that are visited. Conventional wisdom says more visits is better and the line on the graph should head ever upwards. Of course the growth cannot be infinite, but nonetheless there is no assessment of where use of the website might reach a plateau.
If visitors to websites have difficulty in finding information they want, they may either leave immediately and seek it elsewhere, or hunt around visiting many pages in a vain attempt to reach the information. The latter will register as increasing page views but as a measure of failure rather than success. But either way without qualitative measures the numbers can be interpretted as either good or bad… all very confusing!
But I’m going to point out that in some circumstances we might want a reverse trend and web visits to actually fall.
For example, we might have an online reporting mechanism to allow users to notify us of problems with footpaths in the countryside. The more successful we are in maintaining footpaths, the less likely we are to receive visits to the web page where the problem can be reported. So fewer visits could also be a measure of success.
I was in Washington DC a few years ago visiting relatives. It was a very cold but sunny November day. I walked the 1.2 miles from the Washington Monument along the National Mall to the United States Capitol (or the Hill as it’s known in political circles).
A large crowd of people were gathered for a rally on the large grassed area in front of the building.
As I got the top of the steps in front of the Capitol I knelt down to tie a shoelace. As I got up, an SUV with black windows pulled up less than five feet away from me. The door opened and out got Ted Kennedy.
He stood around shaking hands with some people and confering with others while speeches were being made from a platform at the front of the crowd. The speakers were eloquent and well received.
Then it was the turn of Ted Kennedy to speak. I don’t recall what he said, but I do remember the absolutely charismatic way he held the audience and how his words and phrases lifted the crowd. He was dressed in suit without a topcoat seemingly not noticing the cold… it was an impressive performance for a man in his mid-seventies.
I was at a presentation by Brewster Kahle, the co-founder of the Internet Archive a couple of years ago. I recall his claim that if all the books in the entire world were digitised, the files could be stored in space around the size of a commercial freezer. Their Million Book Project which, quite obviously, aims to scan a million titles and make them available online via the Internet Archive, is a large step in assembling such a digital library.
And now it looks like the mighty Google are about to sign an agreement with the Bibliotheque Nationale de France to allow Google to scan the library’s enormous catalogue of works and add them to the Google Books project. Whilst our Museums and Archives Service have digitised thousands of images and objects, these large projects involved digitising literally millions of pages.
Couple the ever improving technology with the availability of digital downloads and I believe we are rapidly moving towards a greater use of this medium. Even our Library Service is about to offer downloads of digital books.
The choice of e-book readers is getting larger, and the hardware is better and easier to use. There’s rumour of a new Apple ‘Tablet’ which will offer the touch screen e-book reader functionality in colour as well as a myriad of other computer functions which will move the goal-posts yet again.
I remember people saying’ why would I need a mobile phone’ or a ‘home computer’ and now there’s hardly anyone without them. I know there are a few of you who take perverse pride in not having either, so you don’t need to write in to tell me. So whilst there will be loads of you saying that you will only ever read books made of card and paper, there will be plently of others who will gradually migrate to e-books.
In the same way that we now use Google as the first stop search and research tool, and look at the results on screen rather than heading to the library and thumbing through Encyclopaedia Britannica, people will get used to using e-books and younger people will know no different.
So let’s look further ahead… in a world where there is universal wireless access, your device downloads only the page you are reading… as you metaphorically turn the page on the e-book reader, the new page instantly downloads… nothing is stored locally… any title from millions of books is available instantaneously… sounds good to me!
In the same way that sailors will always sing about the sea, web people like me blog about the internet, computers and web stuff in general. Once a week I have to write something that you will want to read… and so far there has been a rich vein of topics to mine.
This blog started as an experiment to see whether CCRA staff would engage with this medium… that was 18 months ago.. and since then there have been 20,093 views of the 80 postings I have made to date. The busiest day was Wednesday 29 April with 456 views about Tripadvisor for cultural heritage. So, from my viewpoint, the effort put into writing the blog has not been wasted.
I’d now like to offer all of you the opportunity to submit items as ‘guest bloggers’. As well as the obvious kudos of being selected to add your thoughts to this prestigious online publication, it will also allow us to offer a different perspective on the web and our department. The only guidelines are that the topic has something to do with the internet, web technologies and CCRA if possible… so who is first in the queue?
Most of you probably now use Google to search the web… indeed ‘Googling’ has found its way into common language as a generic term for web searching in much the same way as hoovering has for vacuuming.
When I first started using the web in the pre-Google era, Alta Vista was the search engine I used. There was also Yahoo!, Magellan, Lycos, Infoseek and Excite. There’s also the unpleasantly titled Dogpile, and having tested it, it’s appropriately named. There are also meta search engines which aggregate results from a number of different search engines.
When we survey how people find our pages on Hantsweb, the majority come via Google. HCC also uses Google as the tool for internal searching of both the website and the intranet.
Search engine competition has been making the news frequently over the last few months as new search engines attempt to rival Google’s near monopoly.
First came Wolfram Alpha… its strength is data based and computational information… try typing in your birthday into the search box. It is still in de evopment and has a lot more data capture to do before it becomes useful.
Then there’s the ridiculously named Bing, Microsoft’s attempt to unseat Google. Bing apparently is supposed to suggest the noise made when the correct information is found… say it out loud and you’ll see what I mean.
But there are other search engines which deliver information in a less conventional way. My favourite, Searchme, which showed results as a coverflow of pages sadly closed down in June. Try these Search cube | Viewzi | Kartoo |Ujiko .
Current search engines use a keyword-based approach to indexing web page, however when the keywords have one of more meanings, the results will return all meanings of that keyword. The future is said to be semantic searching, which deals with meaning and therefore ought to provide improved results by using data to ‘disambiguate’ queries and web text… in the meantime try the next-generation of Google’s web search… it looks the same but underneath it apparently works in a different way.
And if you want to find out who said “As long as one keeps searching, the answers come”…
I’ve flown quite a few times in recent months, and each time I have to listen to the pre-flight safety demonstration required by the aviation authorities. Air crew are trained to evacuate the entire aircraft in 60 – 90 seconds, which considering it takes up to 45 minutes to get every on is pretty fast… and watching the safety demo is meant to make sure that you don’t dawdle behind in the case of a major air disaster.
Those of you who have flown will be familiar with the safety instructions demos which vary little from airline to airline.
Just as you are getting yourself settled and the aircraft is on its way to the runway, either video screens will run the safety presentation or the air crew will demonstrate the safety procedures from the aisles.
The demos are not the most exciting and the aircrew often look bored and even embarrassed as they run through the safety procedures. First it’s locating your nearest exit, where they use strange hand gestures to indicate where it is, reminding you that it might be behind you. Then they tell you about the floor lighting where they, unsurprisingly, point to the floor.
This is followed by a demonstration of how to open, close and tighten the seat belt, identical to those used in cars when seat belts were first fitted in the 1970s. In addition you’re shown how to use the oxygen mask in case of cabin pressure loss, and find and put on the life jacket hidden under your seat, inflate it at the right time and know how to blow the emergency whistle. I’m always slightly concerned when they tell me about the tube to blow into if the life jacket doesn’t inflate properly.
It’s easy to make fun of the process, and for once I have avoided cheap jokes as statistics reveal that those people who actually listen to the safety demos and read the card in the seat-back are more likely to survive a crash. I’m not exactly sure how they know, as the dead people aren’t there to ask whether they bothered to watch the demonstration.
Anyway for those of you unfamiliar with a flight safety film, you can watch this video… you’ll need a computer with sound to fully appreciate the experience. While you watch it, try and block out your surroundings and imagine you’re jetting off somewhere nice instead of going to work!
Sorry but I’m still caught up with the swine flu panic and alarm… in particular it’s the slogan ‘Catch it, Bin it, Kill it’.
OK… now I’m not an expert at marketing but I would have said the thing you really didn’t want to do was ‘catch it’. I know they mean contain the porcine virus before it can be ingested by others, but nonetheless it’s somewhat ambiguous.
The slogan ‘Catch it, Bin it, Kill it’ is actually being reused from the previous avian flu scare, and has been criticised because we’re so used to seeing Kleenex ads that the sight of someone sneezing has minimal impact.
I remember, as a very young child, being told not to sneeze explosively and spray snot in all directions. Maybe the art of sneezing into a handkerchief or at least a cupped hand has been forgotten, and quite certainly the health authorities think this is something we now need reminding about.
Either way, the webteam are prepared. We have set up a system on the website to make sure that if any of our services are affected by the illness, that we can keep the public informed… but it depends on you, CCRA staff to let us know about closures or changes of service. There are online forms on the CCRA intranet homepage which will let you send notifications to both the webteam and Hantsdirect.
Hopefully we won’t need to put these contingency plans into effect… that is, if you remember the golden rule ‘Catch it, Bin it, Kill it’.
Next posting won’t be until after 10 August!
