Three local government websites that show a new direction for councils online.

Here are the slides from my presentation on the mobile internet and local government today at the Public Sector Forums conference in Birmingham.

I’m thinking about whether councils should have a website at all. Is there a better way for local government to interact using the web?

Running a workshop today taught me a few lessons about the value of group work on projects.

This week has been about some improvements to my new website design and a renewed enthusiasm for Twitter.

Running a website means everything that happens on the site takes place in full public view. Any design tweak, software upgrade or testing you do can be seen by anyone who visits your website which can make you look unprofessional if things don’t go according to plan.

The Writely service has now been merged with Google’s spreadsheet system to become the imaginatively named “Google Docs & Spreadsheet”.

Inspired by a post by Rohit Bhargava I thought I’d try to make it easier for readers of my blog to add the RSS feed to their favourite feedreader and to their preferred social bookmarking site.

I’ve always tried to keep an eye on my blog traffic statistics, but a deeper look into the three tools I’ve been using threw up a bit of a surprise.

Today is OneWebDay – “a global day to celebrate online life”. When I heard I did take a few minutes to reflect how the internet has changed the life I lead.

I have been running this website for around five years now. Over that time it’s evolved from a few simple pages about marketing consultancy services into a much larger beast.

Meryl K Evans has a new ChangeThis manifesto published called Five Quick Tips to Building a Better Blog.

If you’re reading this it means my transfer over to new hosting at Dreamhost is complete.

Among the feeds I read regularly is Signum sine tinnitu by Guy Kawasaki. It looks this morning like something has gone a bit wrong with Guy’s Feedburner feed.

Over in Australia Lee Hopkins is feeling the frustration of leading adoption of Web 2.0 tools amongst his clients.

Inspired by 37signals and Matt Weston I’ve been thinking again about my site – how it’s structured, what it looks like and what it actually says.

Figured it was about time I got with the tempo and started using Technorati tags on my posts.

Building your site mostly or all in Flash is a bad idea. Yet still mistakes are made by big businesses that should know better, most recently River Island.

Bob Janes has done some further work on my Textpattern end user manual to make it more user friendly.

A colleague recently pointed me in the direction of “Google Analytics”:http://www.google.com/analytics. It looks like a pretty comprehensive solution for analysing web traffic, including how it reaches your site, and how it converts on the site.

The Royal Yachting Association has chosen Whitstable Yacht Club’s website as the winner of the RYA Communications Award – South East region.

I’ve been working hard over the last few weeks to redevelop designs and content for this site.