Finding things

There is one search box, at the top of every page, and it searches everything City Council offers rather than one section of it.

The search box

Type into it and press the button. You land on the catalogue, which is the one place where services, courses, e-learning, guidance and news are all shown together. Results come back grouped by what they are, so you can tell a two-day course from an annual agreement at a glance.

It needs no scripting and there is no dropdown of suggestions to fight with. The box carries whatever you last searched for, so refining a search means editing a few words rather than starting again.

The groups on the catalogue

Nothing chosen gives you a few of each kind. Each group heading carries a link saying how many there are in total, and following it narrows the page to that kind alone. There is no separate row of checkboxes, because the headings already offer that choice and two controls for one decision is one too many.

The kinds are the five service types, plus courses, e-learning, guidance and news. What each service type commits you to is on the catalogue.

What you can and cannot see

Reserved material is listed to everybody with its title and its summary, and opened only by those entitled to it. That is deliberate: you can tell that a thing exists and what it is about, which is how you know whether the subscription is worth having, but you do not get the body of it for free.

When something is reserved, the page says which subscription opens it and what to do next, rather than simply refusing. See guidance and documents.

Browsing instead of searching

• Catalogue for everything at once.
• Training for dated courses, with a planner view that lays the term out by date.
• E-learning for modules you can start now.
• Guidance and News for written material.
• Contacts for the named person in each service area.

Service area pages

Each service area has a page of its own, reached from the catalogue or from the contacts directory: what the team does, what it sells, who to speak to and what it has published. If you deal with one team more than the others, that page is a better starting point than the catalogue.

Finding this guide again

It is the User guide item in the menu at the top of every page, and it is also at the top of the Help column in the footer. Every page in it has an address of its own, so a link to the page that answers a colleague's question can be pasted into an email.