Local Government
The first site Hilary developed was for Welwyn Hatfield Council and was followed by sites for Dacorum, London Borough of Barking & Dagenham, Stevenage and Hertsmere.
For some of these Hilary was the primary point of contact with council staff, and did the majority of site maintenance. Most of them had interactive features which Hilary developed using MySQL and PHP4 eg. councillor searches, local events entry and search, bin collection day searches, planning application search.
Council sites are invariably large and complex and are driven by demands of central government as well as the needs of the local population. They have to cater for users who are not experienced internet users, ease of use and accessibility are important considerations.
Hilary also developed a couple of intranet applications for Barking & Dagenham, firstly a telephone directory and secondly an 'Interactive Recruitment Toolkit'. This was a system designed to assist managers with the process of recruitment, channelling them through the correct procedure. It kept track of their recruitment processes, current status and task of each and produced the documentation needed at each stage, often in the form of dynamic pdfs. It was developed using object oriented PHP4,making use of several design patterns and a MySQL database and PDFLib for the pdf functions.
Due to central government requirements all the councils introduced content management systems and subsequently devolved maintenance work to the various departments. Hilary redeveloped the St Albans site in the Hyperwave system in 2007, although this was abandoned before launch because of the high licensing cost of the product.