Archive for March 2010
Directgov starts seeking feedback
To their great credit, Directgov have added a feedback box to the bottom of nearly every page on the site, asking how useful you find the page contents. Responses are anonymous, and there's some nice javascript to aid usability: a jQuery-based character count and validation check prior to submission. The language is maybe a bit [...] read on »
Live text commentary in WordPress
I don't usually blog about projects until after they've happened; but I'm going to make an exception for something that's going to happen later today. For just about a year, we've been looking after the website for The Big Care Debate, the government's large-scale consultation on the funding of long-term social care. We've had a [...] read on »
Code your own BBC News homepage
The BBC has announced plans to switch off its low-graphic websites: The low graphics version of the site was designed as a low bandwidth alternative to the full website at a time when most users of the site were using slow dial-up connections. Now, most of our users are on much faster broadband connections and [...] read on »
Telegraph calls No10 site 'a technical mess'
Last night, the Telegraph published a piece by their head of audience development, Julian Sambles accusing the Downing Street website of being 'a technical mess'. This damning conclusion was based on the following criticisms: It wasn't in the top search results for a few randomly-selected Budget-related search terms. It doesn't have a 'link canonical' tag [...] read on »
Tories' commentable Budget
Following the apparent success, back in December, of presenting a leaked draft of the government's IT strategy for reader comments, the Conservatives have repeated the trick by laboriously scanning every page of the Budget book, and presenting them on commentable WordPress pages. They aren't asking for email addresses on comments, and aren't posting the comments [...] read on »
Number10's iPhone app
I finally gave in, and upgraded the company's iPod Touch for the purposes of testing the brand new iPhone app from 10 Downing Street. And then, as I spent an hour randomly resetting and restoring, I promptly remembered why I hadn't upgraded for so long. Anyway... On a technical level, the Number10 app is actually [...] read on »
Brown's big picture of the digital future
Gordon Brown's speech, describing a vision of Britain's digital future, is stirring stuff, with its pledges to make Britain a world leader in terms of digital jobs, public service delivery and 'the new politics'. The announcements and commitments came thick and fast - from the £30m to create an Institute of Web Science, to be headed [...] read on »
SEO as a political campaigning tool
I've mentioned this before, but it still brings a smile to my face. One consequence of the rebuild of Lynne Featherstone MP's website, which we launched last September, has been a marked improvement in Google performance. And it's arguably my greatest personal triumph that if you search Google for 'haringey council' - the top suggested [...] read on »
Another version of IE in circulation. Great.
Oh fantastic. I return from a few days holiday to discover that Microsoft has issued a 'platform preview' of Internet Explorer v9. So now that's four major releases of Microsoft's monopolistic browser in circulation: and I can't even install IE9 for testing purposes, because it doesn't - and won't - run on XP, the version [...] read on »
From my presentation to new civil servants
On Tuesday this week, I gave a presentation at the Government Communication Network's foundation course for new entrants - talking about the current online and social media landscape, and highlighting a few specific implications for those working in government. I haven't received the feedback questionnaire summary yet; but the initial signals look encouraging. (Thanks Sue.) [...] read on »