blog.

I have had the pleasure this morning to support Les Compton of Bristol City Council with presenting our website Go Places Do Things at the Engage event at the Watershed.

The workshop was arranged to discuss digital tools for participation and active citizenship with participants from the UK, Germany and Denmark.

ENGAGE is a continuing professional development programme for European youth workers who wish to understand the new ICT-enabled culture and explore how web 2.0 and social media tools can help to extend and enhance their practice.

Les and I went along to talk about our participation with young people while developing and evolving the GPDT site, as well as discussing the challenges that we have faced and the plans for the future. We discussed the access we have given to youth workers and other activity providers for adding their own events and direct feeds that have been set up from the BCC events online and 1 Big Database.

After Bristol the programme will move to Aarhus, Denmark and then on to Hannover in Germany where participants will continue to develop their understanding of how developments in ICT and online technologies can amplify and extend the voice of young people in European society.

The session was really interesting and we had the opportunity to discuss the other online solutions that people have set up, as well as talking about how to get young people to participate and engage as young editors on website content.

I will certainly be following the progress of the programme via the Engage website and will be looking to keep in touch with some of the participants at the workshop.

As we announced previously Connexions West of England is now called Learning Partnership West and we have just launched their new website.

This is the first phase of the project set up to promote the new brand and services. Additional phases are in the pipeline that will see the introduction of user accounts for access to additional features and a whole new area for the Shared Commissioning Services.

You can see the website here and LPW would love to receive your comments on the site and/or questions about their service.

The new Connexions West website (a delivery branch of LPW), which will be purely tailored towards their young service users, will be launched at the beginning of September. It will include a new website design and tools such as an online CV builder and eConsultations – making the organisations online offering far more interactive.

As part of National Families Week, Emily went along to the launch event for Bristol City Council's Bristol Parenting Hub website last Wednesday, and met the Deputy Lord Mayor!

The site, designed to signpost parents of children and young people of all ages to key pieces of information regarding their children's upbringing, had a great response, and we hope to see user numbers grow over the coming months.

We're always looking to add to the information carried on there, so take a look and let us know what you think!

Today sees the launch of Portsmouth City Council's Play in Portsmouth website, to showcase play areas and adventure playgrounds across the city, funded through the Government’s Play Pathfinder project.

It was a great project to work on, and the site really reflects the principles of ‘play’; that it should be bright, fun and inclusive. Having worked on similar projects for Bristol City Council (Go Places To Play), we were in a really good position to understand their requirements and use our experience to deliver a site that not only looks great, but does everything it needs to.

One of the tenets throughout the project has been that: “Play is one of the defining characteristics of a good childhood and all children and young people have a right to play.” Judging by some of the big kids we have in our office, I’m not sure I’d limit it to just children and young people! Web developers like to play, too... 

On Tuesday evening Emily and I attended the launch event of the Bristol City Council Pledge to Children in Care, which is supported by their new RVoice website – designed and developed by Focus.

We had lots of positive feedback from people at the event including Annie Hudson, Strategic Director for Children, Young People and Skills, who gave us a special thank you in her ceremonial cake cutting speech – which was much appreciated.

The site and The Pledge document have all been created with the same graphics and style – created by Simon Mosse our designer.

Now that the site is up and running we’ll continue to work closely with the Children in Care Council, Bristol City Council and Reconstruct to ensure that the content is kept up to date and interesting, as well as reviewing the usage, stats and goals for the site to keep it moving forward.

The Children in Care Council’s (CiCC) RVoice website went live today, after a year’s hard work and collaboration between the CiCC members and Reconstruct, Bristol City Council and Focus.

We carried out a workshop with the CiCC members to establish what was liked & disliked for the look and feel of the site as well as the functionality and information to be included. They were a really pro-active group of young people and very easy to work with, which is why I think we've ended up with such a great looking site.

The CiCC members, including 16 year old Becca, who is the chair of the council, have been actively involved in contributing content to the site and the administrators have been busy adding and tweaking the text, images and files via their new administration system.

Here's what Becca has to say about the new site:

The website is amazing! Its got a really good design which we children helped design. It's got everything you could need to know about being in care on there, and most important of all - it's got My Blog! I'm very excited about having my own blog and it means that other young people can read all about what me and the Children in Care Council are getting up to on their behalf and what changes we're making in Bristol.

The site's live now, so please go and have a look - it will be launched officially at the end of March.

We're very pleased to unleash our new site on the awaiting public - it's been a long time coming but now the much needed revamp is complete.

We've been busy bees in our studio of late which has meant that putting those final finishing touches to our own site has been put off on a few occasions.

We'd love to hear what you think about the new site - so any and all comments are welcome.  We'll arbitrarily pick our favourite from those made over the next couple of weeks and send the lucky winner a bottle of champagne.  Their comment will also feature in next month's edition of Focus On.