For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been working with the Downing Street team to put together Real Help Now – a fairly modest website, for now anyway, to introduce and demonstrate the practical help available to families and businesses during the recession.
Fundamentally, in this initial build, it’s a news aggregation site – pulling together material not just from national sources, but regional and local too. The aim is to complement the citizen- and business-facing stuff, at Directgov and BusinessLink respectively, by showing what’s actually happening on the ground, well away from Whitehall and the City.
What CMS are we using? Brace yourself – for once, it’s not WordPress. Not yet.
The news content is being managed through a Delicious account. When we spot a new item of interest, we tag it with the relevant region; then, when you click a region on the map, we call the relevant RSS feed in (via Google’s excellent feed API). The feeds give us everything we need; the Delicious tagging tools are excellent; and, of course, it also means Delicious users can interact directly with the account, if they so desire. The ‘latest video’ box works off RSS feeds too: we’re aggregating YouTube feeds from several government accounts, plus relevant material from Downing Street’s Number10TV (which uses Brightcove).
I could bang on about the intricacy of the HTML layering, or the gorgeous JQuery fades on the video box; but you may as well have a look for yourselves. My only disappointment comes from the animation effects I had to ditch late on, when I couldn’t make them work satisfactorily in IE6. (The majority getting a lesser service due to the minority’s refusal to make a free upgrade? – discuss.)
We aren’t making any great claims for this site: it is what it is, a pretty front end, courtesy of regular collaborator Jonathan Harris, pointing to other people’s material, plus a (first person) message from the Prime Minister. But if it can establish itself, there’s naturally plenty of scope to extend and expand into something more communicative and interactive.
Responses
[…] Simon Dickson reports on the new site from the UK Government which currently aggregates news from around the country on what help is available to help businesses and individuals through the current economic difficulties. Fundamentally, in this initial build, it’s a news aggregation site – pulling together material not just from national sources, but regional and local too. The aim is to complement the citizen- and business-facing stuff, at Directgov and BusinessLink respectively, by showing what’s actually happening on the ground, well away from Whitehall and the City. […]
Where you have:
“Click to find out whats going on where you live … ”
You should take a look at geoIP.
Could save a lot of pixel space for more relevant targetted news when the users’ IP is located.
Regarding IE6, how about a conditional stick to encourage people to upgrade?
http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2009/02/to_hell_with_ba.html
Nothing, and I mean nothing, would give me greater professional pleasure. But I haven’t yet been able to persuade clients to bite that particular bullet.
Lookin’ good there, top work Simon! Like the underlying technology too!
[…] Simon Dickson and Dave Briggs have written up, today has seen the launch of a new site aimed at bringing together […]
Actually, if you’re reading this far, can I urge you to have a look at Steph’s piece… and share your ideas. Getting the site up at all was the hardest bit (as anyone involved in HMG will know!); but now it’s there, what can it do for you?
[…] I heard about this when at the time but hadn’t clicked as to how interesting it was. As Simon Dickson explains the back-end is an incredibly simple system for publishing links to useful information: The news […]
[…] googleskillz, is some funky cool company called Puffbox, who admit their involvement for all to see here. The information they give about the project is revealing: It was set up by creating an account at […]