Consumer Focus Corporate Website

In October we announced that we had taken over responsibility for the Consumer Focus corporate website. One of our first jobs was to transfer the site from the ASP.NET content management system provided by the original developers to Wordpress. This involved converting the existing design to Wordpress templates, bringing over all the content and training the staff involved in updating the site. With everything completed we launched the “new” site in late November.

Since then we’ve been working on the second phase of work – a complete content restructure and update to make content easier to find across Consumer Focus’ target audiences. This, together with several tweaks to the look and feel of the site (designed to take advantage of some of the features available in Wordpress), will be completed in the next few weeks.

Both phases have been a huge undertaking, but we felt it was important to make it as easy as possible to make changes in the future, hence the switch to Wordpress. One of the advantages of the Wordpress platform is that it is so easy to extend. Where we need to add in new functionality, it is likely a plugin already exists to do the job. If it doesn’t, creating one is fairly straightforward.

For those that are interested in some of the technical aspects- the site now uses Wordpress MU on a LAMP platform. We control all the code through our SVN repositories and deploy to the servers using Capistrano. This is almost identical to the way in which we manage our other projects such as this site and Recalled Products.

Guidelines for public sector websites

As some of you may be aware, the Central Office of Information (COI) publishes a set of guidelines for UK public sector websites. We’ve spent a fair amount of time working out what we need to do to reach compliance and we’ll be making the necessary adaptations to all Consumer Focus and Labs websites over the coming months.

Does Directgov Deliver?

In December we launched ‘Does Directgov Deliver?‘, Consumer Focus’s first report to allow comments directly from members of the public by way of consultative website. The report itself was produced by the Public & Community Services Team within Consumer Focus and looks at whether Directgov delivers on its promise to ‘provide information and online services for the public all in one place’. We wanted to make it easy to comment on each part of the report, so Wordpress was the obvious choice. We adapted the Commentariat theme developed by the BIS innovation team to power the website.

If you want to comment on the report, head over to the website. Comments will be closing soon but the website will remain online. Sign up to the mailing list on the website (powered by Google Groups) to be kept up-to-date on Consumer Focus’s work on Directgov.

We are now looking at how we can improve the process of collecting comments on our reports, so keep an eye out for future experiments like this.

Recalled Products

As you may have noticed, in December we turned on another set of features on the Recalled Products website. We now pull in photos and related documents for products when they are available. We’re also experimenting with producing some statistics on the number of recalls we import every week, what categories they are in and what the dangers are. Let us know what you think of these and how we can improve them.

Our work on the Stay Private project has continued amongst our other duties. We now have a framework in place and are starting to build the part that submits information to the Telephone Preference Service. As you might imagine, this is one of the most complicated parts of the system as there are multiple forms that need to be submitted for the process to work. We are hoping to have a very early stage test site available in the next few weeks.

We’ve continued to chase Tesco with our data protection request. They have finally responded and sent some of our data to us – although it isn’t quite what we were expecting. I’ll be posting some more details about this on our data blog shortly. (Update: You can read the response from Tesco here).

Some people may have noticed that we’ve moved our websites to a new server. Up until now, we’d been using Slicehost as our hosting provider. While they did a good job and served us well, we weren’t that comfortable with using a server based in the USA. This would have been of particular concern when we got around to launching the Stay Private website. As a result, we’ve moved everything to a new UK based server.

CF Labs has also recently taken over responsibility for the Consumer Focus corporate website. We felt that we were best placed to manage new developments and overall strategy including introducing a social media programme. One of our first priorities is to move it away from the current ASP.NET system to the open source Wordpress CMS. This work is currently on going and is due to be completed in a few weeks time. While the website will not look any different (aside from a few small layout changes), moving it to Wordpress means it’ll be more flexible and easier to maintain. We’re also looking at how we can make Consumer Focus reports and publications more open by using the Commentariat theme developed by the people over at the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS).

As you can see, there are quite a few bits and pieces going on. We’ll keep you updated as work progresses.

We’ve been feeling our way around in this area, submitting pilot Data Protection Act and Freedom of Information requests to various bodies in an effort to hone our information-extracting skills to the level of some of the more frequent denizens over at the excellent WhatDoTheyKnow.com. Our exploits thus far are documented in the new DataBlog section here on the site. Definitely worth a read in the case of one big commercial concern at least.

But we haven’t stopped there. As firm believers in the principles of leading by example, share and share alike and giving something back, we’re currently involved in exploring ways of getting Consumer Focus data out there for use by the development community. CF commissions veritable mountains of research on an enormous range of consumer-related subjects which, after inclusion in reports, invariably ends up languishing on the system in a folder within a folder within a long-forgotten folder. It’s a common situation. Fortunately, CF shares our vision of sharing the data and to this end we’re investigating the status of licensing agreements between CF and its research contractors to make this happen at a point in the not too distant future – watch this space for developments.

The first stage of our work involved planning out what we wanted the site to do. We did this a few weeks ago during a session involving lots of sticky notes, coloured dots and pieces of paper. The outcome (as you can see below) is a sheet of paper outlining what features we want to have and roughly what priority they are. In this case, there are two possible priorities, “essential” and “not essential”. Features like “registration form” are classed as essential, whereas “pretty charts showing complaint levels” are less important.

Once we had done this, we used it to produce a rough sitemap and list of features for the first release. This list of features is a subset of the ‘essential’ items we originally had. These are items we think we must have in order for the site to work – so it includes things such as database structure and user accounts. Once these items are done, everything else can be built ontop.

Our next stage has been to wireframe the site. This has again involved in reverting to the good old pen and paper to sketch out how parts of the site might look and how they will work. Now we have these, we can start building the functionality for the site.

We’ll keep updating you as the site progresses.

Prior to the start of the switchover in Wales, our parent organisation Consumer Focus Wales conducted a mystery shopper survey of aerial installers in Wales.  The aim was to see how well aerial installers in the country were responding to the challenges.  The outcome of the survey has been reported across the media in Wales.

We’ve put together a small and simple website to expose the results from this survey.  The site provides a little backgound to the survey, some analysis, and the results in a Google Spreadsheet.  We’ve released the data under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 license.  This means you can use the data in any way you like as long as you link back to us as the original author.  If you do use the data for something, please let us know – we’d love to see what you do with it.

You can see the website at http://dso-wales.consumerfocuslabs.org.  A Welsh language version is also available.

The aim of the event was to show off the latest beta of their API and let developers browse through ideas submitted by staff, customers and the public during an earlier event.  Around 800 ideas were submitted in total.  These included suggestions such as providing a customisable ‘default’ list of items that could be automatically added to the shopping cart; the ability to text a name of an item or a photo of a barcode/label to Tesco to be added to the cart; an alert service to remind you that something you have bought is about to pass its use-by date; TV red-button ordering services and even online dating based on similar shopping preferences!

The Tesco API will allow developers to work with their catalogue of products and provide ordering services through their own websites and applications.  Its good to see Tesco take this first step to open up their data, hopefully the other supermarkets follow suit.  We hope that Tesco will extend the API in the future to cover clubcard information so that consumers will be able to take control of the data collected about them.  Making this data available could help consumers keep track of their purchases over time and lead to some very interesting and potentially useful services being developed.

You can find out more about the API and the TJam event at techfortesco.com.

If you are a registered user, you don’t need to do anything at your end, but email alerts and RSS feeds will reflect the name change.  The old domain should redirect all requests automatically.

Categorisation
This was a big request from the early users of the website and something we wanted to bring in as soon as we could. We currently have over 380 recalls stored in the database, and each week this grows by around 40. This means there are over 38 pages of notices to go through and leads to some quite hefty emails going out. As it stands, people who sign up get sent every recall we find – not everyone is interested in angle grinders or laser pointers.

Today’s website brings in full categorisation. You can now browse through recalls for a particular category, for example clothing, motor cars, or gas appliances. When you search for an item, this can be filtered by category. Each category comes with its own RSS feed so you can subscribe to the updates that interest you. Also, it’s now possible to filter the email alerts you receive. Just select the category from the options on the sign up form. For example, if you just want to be notified about toys, then that is all we will send you.

To give you some idea of the state of the database – toys & other children’s equipment make up just under a third of the database, and clothing & fashion items take up about 25% of the website.

Improved Import Script
We’ve also made a few changes to the way the import script works. This allows us to detect when items are removed from the EC website. While we do not follow their practice of removing them from the site, we will be marking with them a ‘removed’ tag.

Other Tweaks
There are a few other tweaks around the website, such as the addition of pagination to searches, increasing the number of items in the RSS feeds and adding social media sharing buttons to the recall item pages. Hopefully these will help make the site easier and more useful to use.

Open Sourced Code
Finally, we’ve now open sourced the code for the website. This means that you can download the code to power your own projects. This is an important step for us and marks the first piece of work to be open sourced.

To get the code, just pop along to our Github repository. If you use the code, let us know – we’d love to see what you do with it!

As always, we appreciate all comments, so please take a look at the updated site and let us know what you think.

We’ve been talking for a while about the first project that we’ve been building, and today we’re pleased to be able to switch on the Product Recalls website.

The issue of product recalls is a tricky one.  Some companies publish notices in the national newspapers or display a poster in their shop window. Some of these notices are published on the Trading Standards Institute website; others are published on the European Commission Consumer Affairs site.  However, without checking these sources regularly, there is no easy way of discovering if something you have bought has been recalled.

The website aims to solve this problem.  It collects UK and European product recall notices from the European Commission and publishes them via RSS and email.  You can sign up for weekly or monthly email alerts, search the database of recalls for keywords (such as product or brand name), and subscribe to them through your RSS reader.

We’ve tried to build the site so that recalled products can easily be found in existing search engines – an issue not considered by some of the other solutions.

The site is in its first iteration, so we will be looking at how we can improve the offering over the next few months.  In the mean time, take a look at the site and let us know any comments and suggestions you have.

• Is the idea within our consumer remit?
• Does the idea offer real value to the consumer/end-user?
• Has the idea already been realised? If so, is there room for support, collaborative improvement or opening up data for APIs?
• Do we have/can we obtain the resources to make the idea viable?

We’ve posted our responses on the site, but please feel free to let us know of anything you feel we may have missed in our assessments. One of the things that this exercise has highlighted is the fact that there are an abundance of sites out there that are really useful but perhaps aren’t as well known as they should be. To this end, we’re looking at producing a signposting facility over the coming weeks to make them easier to find.

In the meantime, we’re keeping our call for ideas open so please keep them coming.