Puffbox.com

Adventures in government, politics and open source. Mostly WordPress-related.

Simon Dickson, principal consultant at Puffbox, has been blogging about e-government, online politics, and WordPress since 2005. Some important people read it.

Civil servants are people too

13 March 2009 , ,

rednoseday@no10

Nice to see Downing Street getting into the spirit of Red Nose Day... Well done to those responsible, I know who you are. ;)

I've never quite decided whether or not it's appropriate for government sites to do things like putting up 'Christmas decorations'; I think I'm OK with it, as long as it's professionally done. Opinions, anyone?

And while we're on the subject of Comic Relief... full marks for opportunism go to DFID blogger Emily Poskett: her post about meeting the various celebs climbing Kilimanjiro has made for record traffic levels on the site. The page in question is coming very high up the Google search rankings for several obvious queries. Is there anything wrong with using a popular culture hook for a story about government aid activity? - no, not in my book.

I agree that if professionally done, site decorations are OK. For sites that are perhaps a bit cold in its prose, decorations show a bit of humanity. But then, maybe those sites need to be rewritten anyway to be more warm and inviting.

The Number 10 RND makeover seems to be in line with their friendly tweets.

Love it. Wish I could convince the guys here to do it on our site.

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