| Product: |
Bracknell Forest Borough Council |
| Date: |
04/04/01 (96 review reads) |
| Rating: |
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Advantages: Genuinely a good council, website is OK.
Disadvantages: Given that this is the Silicon Valley of the UK, the website is a bit disappointing!
Like many of you, only the thought of those elusive extra dooyoo miles sent me scuttling off to investigate my council's website. Every piece of communication from them seems to point towards the website, and I've thought about taking a look a number of times, but to be honest, browsing a local authority website didn't come anywhere near the top of my list of fun things to do until tonight....
Thwarted again! Sadly I can't yet write about *my* council website as for some reason best known and understood by those bods we all love so much at dooyoo, the list of possible council sites perversely stops one alphabet letter before mine.
....so, the next best thing is Bracknell Forest Borough Council, blessed with *B* as a beginning letter. If I lived about 4 doors further up *or* down my road, (yes, really!) I'd be paying lower council tax than I am now for services which seem consistently better than the ones I'm currently receiving, and I would be living within the bounds of Bracknell Forest Borough Council.
I did actually live within BFBC's bounds for 8 yrs and I found them an excellent council with an excellent record on environmental issues. Living as close as we still do to BFBC, my sons and I have long enjoyed their wonderful leisure facilities and I now work for a counselling agency supported by BFBC, so investigating their website seems as good an idea as any.
My first impressions of the site weren't 100% positive. It could be my deep-seated hatred of the colours yellow and black in close juxtaposition, or could be that the site really does look naff to the casual browser. Let's give it a chance...
I like the fact that today's local weather is prominently displayed on the front page, as well as the 3-day longer range forecast. Eminently appropriate for a town which has for many years been home to the Met Office. Sadly the Met Office will be relocating in the near future leaving
Bracknell without a major part of its identity.
The next thing I did was to check out a local event which sounded interesting and which I knew nothing about. Bad move. The links were broken. Now I'm intrigued as to what is going on and irritatingly will have to continue just wondering....
I'm going to try and be methodical now, although breaking life-time habits is hard.
Even more prominent on the front page is a section for "Latest News". Inevitably as BFBC includes huge tracts of Crown Forestry land (hence the council's name) this includes news on the response to the current Foot and Mouth crisis(or "foot and *mouse* as one of my Japanese pupils wrote rather picturesquely in her diary this week.) I wasn't very happy to discover that some of the news items, eg on BFBC as "leading the way on egovernment" were only accessible through my acrobat reader. I really don't like reading dociments that way, and obviously to someone without the requisite programme, the news is inaccessible.
There is a list of choices down the left of the home page beckoning me to investigate the delights of "Life, Learning, Leisure (they run out of alliterative words at this point, but nice start!) Working, Community, Your Council and News and Views." Let's sample one assuming it's fairly typical of the rest...Hmmmm difficult choice.
Leisure every time!
To say that this site is informative would be an understatement. It's well-constructed, fast, and for a visitor or local, interesting. I'm a little disappointed though, that in an area of some wonderful parks and forest, and in a town which, let's face it, doesn't exactly bring this to mind if you've never been there, there are few photos of the more beautiful aspects of Bracknell. One extremely tacky picture of a couple of happy shiny people with little children skipping through the forest just keeps on re-appea
ring....sadly there's no virtual sick-bucket.
Quite seriously, Bracknell Forest is stupendously endowed with leisure facilities. These range from the Look Out (A Discovery Centre/Forest Trails Centre/Cafe etc set in miles and miles and miles of stunning Crown Forestry land) to Coral Reef (local waterworld which is extremely highly rated even well outside of the immediate area) and South Hill Park (fantastic Arts Centre offering pretty much anything and everything and set within beautiful parkland)or even the John Nike Centre which offers dry slopes, a bob-sleigh run and a skating rink which is home to the Bracknell Bees ice hockey team. These are thankfully all well-represented here on the site, but nowhere near as creatively as they could be.
This is a good functional website - full of useful local info, but for a council which styles itself "The Borough of innovation in the high-tech heart of Britain" I was a little disappointed that the purely functional hasn't yet given way to the creative and attractive. Perhaps this is a sad reflection on the original style of Bracknell - the "New Town" which was unimaginative, square and rather grey.
I also was not particularly impressed that the Counselling Service I work for which is part of the Council's services is not easily accessible via the search facility on this site. The search did, however throw up plenty of useful info from the search I did on the local district centre within the community where I used to live.
As for schools - there is a lot of information about the issues *surrounding* schools and the choices you might make in this regard, but little direct information on schools within the borough which I was able to track down either via the search facility, or via the "Learning" section. Could do better here I think!
In fact Bracknell schools have a worse reputation *in general* than neighbouring Wokingham or Windsor and M
aidenhead, but the catchments are often less affluent. Some of Bracknell's secondary schools are particularly maligned, and many parents choose to send their kids into Wokingham to school. Notable exceptions are Ranelagh which is non-catchment and *very* strictly selective within the Church of England, and Edgbarrow, which is in Crowthorne rather than Bracknell itself, and therefore has a more middle class catchment. Edgbarrow has recently acquired a new head who has impressed pretty much everyone. One advantage in Bracknell schools is that the council are *far* more likely to be subsidising excellent sports and music training for children than for example in Wokingham, an endless source of frustration to many parents around here.
I had a quick glance at News and Views, and think this is pretty much under construction. Nothing very exciting there unless you are bursting with book and CD recommendations for the local library service. These suggestions can (contain your excitement please!) be emailed direct from the site to the relevant people.
Well, I could wander this site with you a while longer, but I've a feeling you'd be nodding off and I think I've reached my limits of concentration too. BFBC is, in my opinion, genuinely a really good and very innovative council. I often wish it was still *our* council.
Despite the high-tech, new-town image, they are not afraid to try different and even old-fashioned things. One example which springs to mind was the employment of 2 cart horses, Bracken and Bramble, to do some of the work otherwise performed by vans, eg carrying the gardening equipment needed to maintain the displays on Bracknell's many roundabouts. They've also done such wacky (but popular and successful!) things as turn the central part of the main shopping centre into a large beach for the summer holidays (yes, really!) or one of the town squares into a skating rink and ski slope complete with snow at Christ
mastime. The more I think about BFBC in fact, the more I'm sad those 4 houses are inbetween us and them.
The site is passable but very unexciting - useful in dooyoo terms, in fact, probably even very useful. But crown material? Nope. Definitely not. Worth a visit for sure if you live around here or are thinking of visiting, but as a fun browse? Forget it!
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