Real Help Now: a national picture

Real Help Now
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.

9 thoughts on “Real Help Now: a national picture”

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. 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?

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