Puffbox

There's a huge amount of information to digest in COI's 'Reporting on progress: government websites 2009-10', published this morning. It lists, for virtually every government department, an assessment of staff numbers, staff and non-staff spending, page views and unique users, and where available, outcomes of user surveys, and assessments of accessibility and standards compliance. Inevitably, [...] read on »

A bit of a tricky moment this morning. As you might have spotted, Downing Street has launched an initiative asking 'public sector workers' to help the government find ways to implement the massive spending cuts proposed in Tuesday's budget 'in a way that is fair and responsible'. And as has become the norm for such [...] read on »

Some fine detective work by Nick Booth aka Podnosh, to uncover Birmingham City Council's report into the development of its reported - but denied - £2.8m website (mentioned previously here). The executive summary's list of recommendations makes for painful reading: The new CMS 'requires further work before it can be said to function effectively for [...] read on »

Out of the blue last week, I got a call from COI: was I available for an immediate, rapid turnaround WordPress job? I was a bit startled, and detail was lacking; but since this was precisely the kind of rapid-response thinking I've been trying to foster around WordPress for a couple of years, I couldn't [...] read on »

The biggest surprise about the transition to the new coalition administration is how few surprises there actually were. A quick tour of the departmental websites reveals, for the most part, the exact same websites that were there before - albeit a little lighter on content, and with new faces in the About Us section. It's [...] read on »

One way or another, it's going to be a momentous week for UK government. A lot of people will be leaving their Whitehall offices on Thursday evening, not quite sure who they're going to be working for - in terms of the boss, and the organisation - on Friday morning. I've had calls from literally [...] read on »

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 »

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 »

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 »

There's a new website for the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills - aka BIS - this weekend; and as I reported here back in November (sniff!), they're waving farewell to WordPress as their core publishing platform. The new site is built on Sitecore, and is appearing bang on the published schedule. Visually it's really [...] read on »