Lynne Featherstone’s new website

Lynne Featherstone’s new website certainly looks different from her first, created back in 1999:

Websites have come along a long way since then (though of course Lynne looks not a day older). Lynne’s own site has been through a couple of versions, including a redesign by Kingston councillor Mary Reid and getting a blog added alongside a few years later. It’s been showing signs of age, so it’s great that now there is one, shinny, new integrated site – based on WordPress of course.

I’ve given some help with the new site and four features which I particularly like about it is turning out are:

1. Content appearing in multiple places – so you can enter a story once but people can then look up information by area or issue or time. Sounds obvious, and the technology is fairly easy, but not many political sites do it.
2. The Ordnance Survey map of the wards – which will be made clickable once the site has bedded down a little more.
3. Its use of Facebook Connect – which is a major part of the way the web is developing and helps spread news about the site more widely through social networks.
4. And most importantly … the “lifestream” on the front page, pulling together content from lots of different places on the internet into one stream of updates. Although the use of lifestreams is gathering a bit of buzz, I’ve not yet seen any other politician do this. Which either means it’s a stroke of genius or mad. Or possibly both.

The site is still in “beta” in the best sense of that phrase. It doesn’t just mean “you may spot bugs and if so please shout” but also “here’s your chance to give your comments on how the site is turning out”.