It’s the final few days on the migration/development of liverpool.gov.uk into an umbraco site, and baring a few technical barriers all should be well for us to be live before the end of next week.
it’s this time in a project that i enjoy the most, All the core work is [almost] done, and the design and content details have come together you get the opportunity to asses how it all fits and make the little changes that can make a big difference - that’s what i call it, the team call it tinkering.
A good example of small tinkerings that can make a big difference are the changes we’ve made in opening times.
On the current site opening times are there, and they are high priority on the right pages, but they are a bit inconsistent and they are just placed right into the content.
It’s not ideal, not only does it give the user a confusing message, it’s a pain to maintain.
Moving to umbraco has given us the opportunity to improve this, thanks to a helpful package, we now have opening times stored structurally and displaying consistently - and we’ve been able to enhance the user experience too.
Now that the times are now stored structurally we have been able to change the way opening times are displayed so the user gets to the information even quicker.
The default view shows the opening times for today, with the option to show more.
Default view - today’s opening times,
Clicking on more, displays the whole weeks times, with the current day highlighted.
if the user clicks on show more, they get the full weeks times
This is really simple for us to build on top of the site, and allows us to enhance what we tell the user.