Website Features
The following features of our site can help you find information or do what you want to online more effectively.
Homepage
Our homepage is the best starting point for accessing commonly-used services and sections of the site. You'll also see current news and any important announcements or plans.
Different features are contained in the coloured boxes. We have brought together the most frequently used services and popular pages so that you can find what you want quickly.
There are also links at the top and bottom of the homepage, such as a search function and our contact details, which appear on all our pages. See the Headers and Footers section below to find out more about these.
Website content
Each department is responsible for updating the content on their web pages – we have over 50 members of staff who add content to the site. To ensure there is consistency in our writing style, staff attend a web writing course to support this principle.
Improving our website content is an ongoing process; we aim to provide good quality content to ensure our customers get the information required from our site quickly and easily.
If you see a page that needs attention don’t hesitate to let us know, get in touch by emailing the Web Team.
My ERC
If you set up a My ERC account, you can manage your preferences, personalise content and contribute to our website. Currently you can sign up to receive electronic newsletters about your interests, add your club or community group’s details to our searchable database and add an event to our 'What’s On' page. Sign up or log in to My ERC by using the links in the top right corner of all our pages. We plan to add more custom features to My ERC in the future.
Log in or sign up to My ERC
Headers and footers
Some links appear on all our pages, so you can always get to them quickly. At the top left of each page is the East Renfrewshire Council (ERC) logo, which you can select to go back to the homepage. In the top right, you’ll find the Google-powered search box, My ERC log ins and options to change the size of text on pages.
The coloured navigation tabs enable you to jump to particular subject areas.
At the bottom of each page, you’ll find a distinct section with links to other features like the RSS feeds, blogs, and our community websites, as well as useful information like our contact details, privacy policy and a link to have the page content read aloud.
The 'I am interested in' link is helpful if you want a selection of pages about a common theme, such as parenting or disability issues.
Many pages have documents and Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) added to them that are specific to the page content. Scroll to the bottom of any page to see if there is any added content.
Online services: Customer Connect
You can do a lot of things through our site instead of having to phone, write or visit us in person. We have collected some of our most popular online services on our Customer Connect page. For example, you can report a road fault, pay your council tax or apply for an extra bin. As well as sending information to us, you can also get information from us: search the library catalogue, see what planning applications have been submitted or find your nearest recycling point.
You can access these services whenever suits you, 24 hours a day. Link to our Online Services from the homepage.
Customer Connect online services
Points of interest map
Our mapping service can pinpoint a particular address for you, based on a postcode. You can also find the nearest local services to this address by selecting options from a list including doctors, schools, council offices, banks, businesses and much more. The mapping service is available on the homepage.
Accessibility
We aim to make our web site as accessible as possible to the widest range of users. You can find out what technical and style features we have put in place by checking the Accessibility link in the bottom left of all our pages. At the top right corner of each page you’ll find options to alter the text size on pages.
Our site can be viewed comfortably on screens from 1024 x 768 and above.
For the best results, we recommend you use any of the following browsers:
MS Internet Explorer - download Internet Explorer browser
Mozilla Firefox - download Mozilla Firefox browser
Safari - download Apple Safari browser
Read more on our accessibility web page.
Viewing PDFs
Many of our documents are in PDF format and need Adobe Reader to open them. This software is available free of charge from Adobe’s website. All PDF documents on this site will open in a new web browser window. Adobe’s Accessibility Resource Centre has features which help to make PDFs more accessible, such as converting the documents in to HTML format.
Website: Adobe website
Website: Adobe Accessibility Resource Centre
Icons
shows the document is a PDF (Portable Document Format). You need Adobe Acrobat installed to read this type of file. See the link for Viewing PDFs above.
shows the document is in MS Word format.
If a link takes you to a page outside our web site, you'll see this icon next to it. Links that are underlined in blue take you to another page within our site.
appears next to any email address on our pages. If you want to send an email, click on the address to open a new message in your email application.
Feedback
We want to know what you think about our services, and also about our web site, so that we can continue to improve them. To comment on a council service, use the Contact us link at the top of any page. If you have a comment about a web page, use the tell us what you think of this site link at the bottom of each page.
Social bookmarks - What are these?