• I Moved from the Technical and System Co-ordinator post to Senior Web Developer at Great Yarmouth Borough Council. With the former I was involved in the operation and maintenance of the LED Broadcasting Screens, DMX lighting products and the development and management of some tourism web sites. With the latter, I have technical responsibility for delivering and developing the web services that the Council provides.
• I assisted in creating a full-time web team to support the online services that the Council provides.
• I developed my skills and knowledge at an unprecedented rate in a relatively short period of time.
• I started my BSc (Hons) in Information Communications Technologies with the Open University as well as achieving ITIL Foundation certification. I have also completed a number of short courses related to the Open Text Live Link WCM Presentation Server CMS and the .NET 3.5 Framework.
• I began the replacement and redevelopment of the corporate web infrastructure and website - this is progressing well and provides an excellent foundation and framework for future developments and online services.

During 2009:

• Move house!
• Complete the first phase of the new corporate website, launching a public beta in the first quarter of 2009, prior to going live. I will also continue to develop and integrate new and improved services into the website.
• Aim to ensure the new Corporate Website starts and remains in the top 10 of Local Government Websites benchmark provided by Sitemorse.
• Continue my support and development of the Flegg High PE ONLINE website.
• Continue my personal development through self learning, experience and, if possible, further short courses.
• Continue my study with the Open University. If possible, I would like to start three, 30 credit courses this year.
• Continue my Open University Study Journal and write frequent posts about the new corporate website among other posts.
• Aim to make greater use of Social Media tools, primarily Twitter.
• Look to implement some GTD methods into my working practice to increase my productivity.

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Shortly after submission of the assignment, I received my results. I scored 100% which equates to 5% of my overall continuous assessment score (OCAS)  for the course.

In order to pass this course (T175), students are required to achieve a total mark of 40% for OCAS and 40% for Overall Examination Score (OES). OES is an end of course assessment that could be delivered by an examinable component or assignment, in this case, an assignment. From my first Tutor Marked Assignment (TMA 01) and CMA 41, I have scored 14.2% towards OCAS - 9.2% and 5% respectively. I have three more TMA’s and two CMA’s to submit which will accrue additional marks towards OCAS. These assignments are worth 25% each and the CMA’s 5% each.

I am currently working on the second TMA. TMA 02 is due to be submitted on 8th January 2009.

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• Submitted and received feedback on my first Computer Marked Assigment (CMA) - I scored 100%.
• Completed the basic functionality of the eGMS IPSV tool for the Corporate CMS.
• Handed over CMS to Web Content team for testing, navigation integration and feedback.
• Made minor ammendments and bug fixes to the navigation structure, code base and functionality of the new corporate site.
• Undertaken Sitemorse compliance, performance, accessibility and functionality testing across the new corporate website - currently scoring an exact score of 10.00.

Next Week:

• Annual leave - returning to work, Monday 5th January 2009.
• Enjoy some quality family time over the festive period.
• Work on my second Tutor Marked Assignment (TMA) towards my OU degree.
• Continue redevelopment of templates for the Flegg High PE ONLINE website.
• Refresh knowledge of the ASP.NET 3.5 Framework.
• Read through the ITIL v3 Service Design literature.

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• Test URL configured in preparation for beta site release and ongoing unit testing.
• Accessibility, functionality, code quality, performance and meta data tests have been undertaken on the new site inline with continual improvements.
• Trained our Web Communications Manager on the Site Administrator tool.
• Created and associated content policies restricting font styles, file sizes and review periods for text and documents uploaded by authors into the CMS.
• User roles created for the CMS and DN’s assigned to the roles.

Next Week:

• Complete and submit my first CMA for my OU course.
• Continue integration of IPSV into the CMS and resolve a few minor bugs with the code.
• Complete my draft blog posts.
• Learn about and create Custom Properties in our corporate CMS.

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The website is a key channel to support the shift of customer contact from face-to-face and telephone contact to the web. In order to aid in the shift, the journey of our customer, findability and accessibility of the site’s content needs to be improved. It can be seen from the Sitemorse Local Government Website Benchmarking Report that the website is not performing to its optimum capabilities and this is one of the drivers in the sites redevelopment and the continual improvement process.

So far, the project has included infrastructure replacement and installation of the latest release of our corporate CMS - Open Text Live Link Web Content Management Presentation Server.

We are currently working on a total redevelopment of the website’s code base, look and feel. The website is being totally recoded to meet the WCAG 1.0 AA standard and will include some new functionality. The redevelopment has been focused around accessibility, usability and findability - this includes improved site search and navigation.

The new site will have a Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) based layout. The presentation, content and behavioural layers will be seperated to aid in future maintenance and development. This also reduces the impact of bandwidth constraints on the site as the CSS’ are cached locally on the client and not reloaded on each page refresh. All the xHTML code is currently validating successfully using the W3C HTML and CSS validation tools as well as meeting all of the priority 1, 2 and 3 WCAG 1.0 automated checkpoints. The templates have been tested in all of the popular user agents as recorded in our analytics data as well as different operating systems and at varying screen resolutions. Different font sizes can be selected by the customer as well as text-only and varying contrast pages managed through the implementation of dynamic frameworks.

The new site will adopt a fixed width design, text-to-speech functionality and improved navigation based around the Local Government Navigation List (LGNL). Customer satisfaction will also be measured with the implementation of Govmetric. Naming conventions will be implemented that will aid in improving the organic search engine optimisation and search results. The content will be no further than three clicks from the landing page, certain information, as such as licensing, will be contained in more than one section. Customers will be advised of services not provided by the Local Authority and redirected to the website containing this information.

The new site is due to be launched next year with a public beta available prior to the go-live.

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• Started template redevelopment for the Flegg High PE ONLINE website.
• Written a couple of blog posts.
• Attended the first online tutorial for my OU Degree.
• Upgraded the corporate CMS to the latest release and arranged configuration of a test URL.
• Undertaken authoring tool comparison for the corporate CMS.
• Learn’t CQL for use within the CMS.

Next Week:

• Training a colleague on the backend of the CMS.
• Starting work on my first Computer Marked Assignment and next Tutor Marked Assignment.
• Continue CMS development.

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The tutorial group were split into two equal sized groups. One group participated yesterday morning, with the remainder undertaking the same exercise on the 3rd December 2008. Within my group, there were approximately half-a-dozen students. We were tasked to debate and conclude the following question:

To what extent are virtual worlds replacing the real one?

Initially, we commenced the tutorial with some general banter to familiarise ourself with the environment. This was a new experience for many of us and also the first time that many of the tutor group members had communicated with each other.

When answering the question, numerous ideas were raised. The majority of the discussion focused around entertainment, an area where virtual worlds are having a major impact on real world life. During the debate, we raised interaction as a key element and also the social impacts that the virtual world has on real world life. In particular, I raised the article about the Second Life affair leading to a real life divorce. The article is available here and here, if you haven’t already read about this. After aproximately 45 minutes, we concluded that the virtual world won’t replace the real world, instead, it will enhance certain areas; for example, communications and marketing.

During the debate, our tutor was online and monitoring the discussions taking place. Our tutor was available to provide support, encouragement and guidance as necessary. The discussion progressed well and stayed on track - crucially, we didn’t stall at any point during the tutorial. Participation in the tutorial was a required element of our next Tutor Marked Assignment due in January 2009.

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