Technical Notes

I have included some technical background here.

Website Background
This web site enables the easy viewing and downloading of all the reports (required by legislation) for all the contested wards for all the 32 councils for the main Local Government elections which occur every five years. The last main election was May 2022. The next main election is due on 6th May 2027. There are currently 355 wards - with most main elections having around seven or so uncontested ward elections (which don't produce reports).
Over 97% of the web pages for this website are programmatically generated by a Python program. There are only a dozen manually-built web pages - all top-level.
There are approximately 5,000 URL's within the 400 or so automatically-generated web pages.

Website Design Philosophy
The website main design goals were accuracy, completeness, consistency, availability and accessibility. Currently, there is no consistency across the 32 councils as regards the publication of these reports. There is no commonality in website design. More importantly, some councils remove the reports after weeks/months/years.
Accessibility: the website design is very intentionally simple. There is no clutter; there is a high contrast between foreground and background; the fonts have been carefully selected; the colours are soft.
The web pages are W3C-compliant. There is no AJAX or Javascript - and so there are fewer web browser restrictions.

  
Software used My Workstation Operating System: Windows 11 National Results Reporting Portal website - Website Design CoffeeCup FileZilla / WinSCP Programming Language: Python (IDE: Spyder) + Pandas Server hosted by IONOS (1&1). Virtual Private Server (VPS) Ubuntu Linux Apache (or NGINX) Raw HTML pages - no web design software like WordPress. Basic File Downloading/Renaming/Correction Directory List & Print Pro Bulk Rename Utility UltraEdit Excel Basic File Content Analysis UltraEdit Excel EncodeAnt

Copyright/IP Notice
No permission is required to copy any aspect of this website. Similarly, no citation is required.


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