Puffbox

It's now two years since DCSF published their Children's Plan - I know - and Ed Balls wants to know what impact it has had on you. They've published a progress report, and launched a commentable website... based on, guess what, WordPress. Not the first time they've gone down the open source route: a year [...] read on »

You might have seen coverage in the last few days of the Government's forthcoming ICT strategy - 'New world, new challenges, new opportunities' - which leaked out last week, and is due to be published next week to coincide with the Pre Budget Report. The first I saw of it was at UKAuthority.com, with follow-up [...] read on »

The Conservatives won plaudits for the MyConservatives social networking platform they launched at their annual conference; and now the LibDems are slowly getting their own Act together (ho ho). Labourspace remains a bit of a joke. But one UK political party has been quietly developing its own social network for a few months now, with [...] read on »

The Press Association is the engine which powers the UK news machine. In effect it's a cooperative owned by the UK's regional and national newspapers. It has noticed that, as funds get tighter, its members have stopped reporting on local democracy - council meetings and the like. And it's working on a proposal to fill [...] read on »

Today sees the launch of the latest little site we've built on behalf of - or more accurately, in collaboration with - BIS, the Department for Business Innovation and Skills. It's a pretty straightforward WordPress build for something called the National Student Forum: a panel representing HE students' interests, whose latest annual report was published [...] read on »

One of my bigger projects this year has been the website for the Care And Support green paper, aka The Big Care Debate. Basically, the country is in desperate need of a new funding model for long-term care of the elderly and disabled: and in July, three funding options were put forward for consideration. And [...] read on »

We're proud to unveil our latest creation: a new website/blog for Lib Dem MP Lynne Featherstone (or try this link if the DNS hasn't rolled over for you yet). It's taken a good few months, and has thrown up challenges on a scale I haven't had to tackle before. But equally, it presented several opportunities [...] read on »

Two major departmental website changes (that I'm aware of?) today - a completely transformed website for Defra, and a new look for BIS's corporate site. The Defra site feels like an incremental improvement of what went before. Gone is the blocky layout and earthy (and somewhat apt?) colour palette, replaced by the de facto standard tabs [...] read on »

I'm sure we've all done it. You're creating a new WordPress installation, and for a bit of privacy whilst you build the thing, you choose not to 'allow my blog to appear in search engines like Google and Technorati'. But in the rush to get the site out the door, you forget to switch the [...] read on »

Last week, I shared the general sense of shock around the blogs at news about Birmingham council's new website: 3.5 years late, and costing £2.8 million. But last night, to my great surprise, I came across BirminghamNewsroom.com - a WordPress-powered website for the council's press office, launched a couple of months back. It's based on iCompany [...] read on »