Blog

Southend-on-Sea Borough Council recently embarked on a new Local Plan, seeking to provide high-quality, affordable homes for the growing population and to ensure that local businesses continue to thrive, whilst preserving the rich history of this iconic seaside town. JDi Solutions has been working with Southend for over a decade, and we were asked to come up with a brand new satellite website dedicated solely to the Local Plan. This gave us the opportunity to combine our website building package, Orchestra, with our popular consultation software, OpusConsult, in order to produce a bespoke hub geared towards providing information to the public and processing feedback on the planning consultations to come.

Here at JDi, we were able to pool our many years of experience in local government needs, allowing us to create a site that is easy to use, engaging, and versatile enough to encompass a long overall period of consultation. As always, we were led in our design by the branding guidelines set out by the council, giving the site a familiar feel for users whilst allowing us to focus solely on the Local Plan. Take a look at the Southend Local Plan website to see what we came up with.

We have also made use of our updated consultation software, OpusConsult2, which we have developed to specifically address local planning needs, and we will be rolling out this software upgrade free of charge to all our existing clients over the course of 2019.

The Southend Local Plan website has been a successful project which we are very proud to be a part of. This website has allowed the council to display their consultations online in a more user-friendly way than ever before, and the use of an entire dedicated website has allowed for a far more robust and understandable structure for navigating the local plan, which for a lot of users can be intimidating. As you would expect, in addition to the main consultation documents, there is a lot of information that needs to be included on this website. We have ensured that while it is simple to navigate to the primary tasks, all supplementary documentation is easily accessible and presented in a manageable way.

If your council is launching an ambitious project in the future, and you would like to see how we may be able to help, don’t hesitate to contact us. We have an excellent understanding of how the local plan process works and many years of experience in developing great websites and consultation systems, and, as with Southend, we are able to work with clients to create bespoke websites to meet the changing needs of councils in the field of local plan consultation.