I'm working on a website where as a key part of the sign up process users have to enter their location. The particular town where a user lives is integral to the functions of a website.
In most of Europe this is easy enough to do. I simply ask for their municipality or the like. Most countries tend to have very smal level local government.
For the UK though, there things are tough.
In London and other big cities it seems fairly easy with things being still divided into wards/boroughs/that sort of thing, but then you have areas like county durham where the entire county is united under one unified government. From my time in the UK I know that this is much too big an area.
So, when asking British people for their location what is good practice?
Post codes? But they are just for the post office and often don't follow lines either political or in people's hearts.
Constituancies? But they seem to be changed a lot. My British friends have no idea which constituency they live in. I'm not trying to show local events on this site, I'm showing overviews of data, where X is the most popular, which Y people like in Z, etc.
A list of all towns over X size? But then what about village people? That will be a lot of towns I have to find and doubtless I will make mistakes in parts of the country I know nothing about.
Letting users enter their own location wouldn't really work as the site is reliant on data about local areas.
Any input as to a usual best practice and how anything close to what I'm trying to do does it?
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