Belfast City Council have launched their new website. At first glance it certainly appears to be much better. The one part of it I use the most, the Minutes system is certainly improved, in so far as I can now actually use it again!

The ‘search’ is still fundamentally broken in all the ways I’ve enumerated previously (but at least they contacted me recently to say that they’d put out a tender for a replacement system incorporating a lot of the suggestions I made).

However, they have finally added a simple ‘browse‘ to avoid me even needing to go near the search at all. It’s still rather confusing in that most of February’s minutes, for example, are on the March page, rather than the February page, due to everything being arranged by “council month” rather than “calendar month”, and the browse only goes back to 2002, whereas the search goes to 1989, but it’s still a dramatic improvement, particularly as it works in Firefox.

Here’s hoping that the new minutes system will actually live up to the tender specification…