2010 – Puffbox

22 Dec 2010

company, politics

djibouti, markpack, wordpress

Puffbox launches site for Djibouti presidential candidate

A month or two ago, to be perfectly honest, I would have struggled to find Djibouti on a map. But for the last few weeks, I’ve been working on a project to launch one man’s campaign to become its President: and the site went live this week.

Djibouti is a former French colony, located on the Horn of Africa, slightly larger than Wales, population well under a million. It’s a key port for the region. It also shares a border with Somalia, sits across the water from Yemen, and is home to large French and American military bases. And it’s having a Presidential election next year. The current incumbent won a second term in 2005, with a mere 100% majority; and this year, they changed the constitution to allow him to stand for a third term.

Djiboutian businessman Abdourahman Boreh has now declared himself an opposition candidate for next April’s election; he is being represented by a London-based PR consultancy, MHP Communications, who brought me in to build a website for the campaign: not voter-facing as such, more as a resource to help establish his credentials internationally.

The site is built on WordPress: primarily pages rather than posts, at this early stage anyway. But significantly, it’s in two languages – English and French, with a long-term possibility of adding Arabic. It soon became clear that fudging the multilingual functionality wouldn’t work: so it’s the first time I’ve used WPML, the leading WordPress plugin for content in more than one language.

To be perfectly frank, WPML has been a bit hit-and-miss. When it works, it’s absolutely brilliant: but some things just haven’t worked at all. I’ve had to deploy various workarounds, sometimes going as far as coding whole new plugins or widgets. And some features, even relatively run-of-the-mill things, I’ve simply had to drop. It’s a great solution for multilingual content; but be prepared for some unpleasant side-effects.

The feature I’m most proud of is also language-related; but is something I’ve coded myself. We’re inviting people to leave comments on most pages; and we’re using a WPML meta-plugin to merge the comment threads between translations. In other words, if you leave a comment on the English version, it’ll also appear at the bottom of the French version. But what if you don’t speak the other language?

Thanks to Google’s translation API, and a bit of jQuery, you can click on a link under each comment to translate it – instantly, and in place – into English or French. Oh, and Arabic if you fancy that too. Try it on this page… but don’t use up my entire API usage limit, please. Obviously we’re in Google’s hands as regards the translations’ quality: the French is certainly pretty accurate, and the Arabic… well, it looks about right anyway.

I’m also quite pleased with the ‘world time’ thing in the top corner: not only is it useful as a clock – but by placing dots on the map, it’s a subtle way of reminding people where Djibouti actually is; and it underlines the strategic connections with France and the US (plus, by extension, the UN). The times are generated based on proper timezone data, and hence should remain accurate all year.

This time round, I’ve done all the design and coding myself. But I’ve had help with the configuration of the WordPress platform, from none other than Mike Little, the man who co-founded WordPress. Mike knows far more about server setups than I (hopefully!) ever will; he’s done a great job tweaking things just that little bit more than normal: so whilst it’s hardly military-level secure, it’s certainly more robust than your average WordPress site – with very little compromising on usability.

It’s been a challenging project, taking me into new territory in several respects, and all the more enjoyable for it. It’s only by doing projects like these, and pushing yourself out of your comfort zone, that you really improve as a designer / developer / producer.

So far, Puffbox has a 100% record with political candidates: every one we’ve ever worked for has been successful. We’ll see if this hot streak is maintained next April.
21 Dec 2010

politics

libdems

LibDems' underwhelming web revamp

When is a fixed-width page not fixed-width?

The world of Liberal Democrat websites is dominated, almost monopolised, by one company – Prater Raines, based in Folkestone. They offer local LibDem parties a corporate website template, plus mailing list facility, plus a shared photo library, plus hosting, plus email, plus DNS, etc etc, for a staggeringly low £250 (ish) a year. When a local party’s key concerns are typically ‘can it do what we need?’ and ‘can we afford it?’, their success is understandable: they host something like 600 sites in the extended LibDem family.

The catch is that every site on the Foci platform, as it’s known, looked more or less identical – which might be fine if that shared look-and-feel was any good. Unfortunately, to be frank, it wasn’t. Being charitable, the sites had begun to look very, very dated: tabular, text-heavy, and lacking in finesse. A clear case of technology first, design a distant second: laudable in some respects, but just not how the game works.

A revamp has been in the works for many months – since long before the general election, in fact – and finally this week, it’s been rolled out across the network: see the examples of Tim Farron, Don Foster, Sarah Teather or the specially souped-up site for Vince Cable. And in a word, it’s underwhelming.

The boxy, full-width layout is gone, replaced by a centred, 1024px-optimised format, sometimes single-column, sometimes two, sometimes three – so far, so good. There’s a hint of gloss in some of the screen furniture, some rounded cornering, even a bit of text-shadowing on the occasional headline. But there’s a definite feeling that they’ve bolted these ‘cool’ elements on top, without really buying into them.

Perhaps the best illustration of this is the aggregated list of site updates, which they’re calling homepage ‘lifestreams’. Hang on… homepage lifestream? Yes, they’ve clearly been inspired by my invention for Lynne Featherstone… except they’ve totally missed the point of it.

Left: not really a lifestream. Right: now that's what I call a lifestream.

Lynne’s lifestream pulls together her activity from multiple third-party sources: it helps readers see what she’s done lately, wherever she might have done it, and at a glance shows her to be very active across multiple social networks. But theirs seem to do no more than aggregate the different content types within the same site: and the token effort to distinguish the different content types fails, because the icons just aren’t strong enough. It’s just a list.

Ah – but then there’s the jQuery-based hover-to-slide thing. As you hover over each headline in the ‘lifestream’ (ahem), it quickly expands downwards to show the ‘excerpt’, and the previous one closes up. If you’re mousing over the list to get to a specific headline, it can be quite nauseating. But more importantly – it actually makes it harder to click on the link you’re interested in. Sometimes you’ll mouse-over your chosen link, only to find it gets moved by the animation, and you’re now clicking on something else… and the headline you wanted may well have disappeared off the bottom of the screen.

Prater Raines deserve a huge amount of respect for their success in this field. Their tremendous economies of scale have allowed them to put together an offering which is, to all intents and purposes, unbeatable. They clearly know their technology. But this was the opportunity to make up for their offering’s presentational shortcomings, at precisely the moment when LibDems, locally and nationally, need a presentational boost… and they haven’t taken it.
17 Dec 2010

e-government

dclg, wordpress

DCLG's WordPress questionnaire

Just a quick post to record that Communities and Local Government have launched what I believe is their first WordPress-based project: Barrier Busting. Based – apparently – on something originally done by BIS, although I don’t immediately recognise it, it’s a fairly modest site built around a one-page survey form, asking people about the ‘bureaucratic barriers’ preventing them doing something in their community.

By the look of it, the form – and the processing code behind it – is hard-coded PHP, dropped into a WordPress custom page template. It’s quite a nice reminder that WordPress itself isn’t the end of the possibilities: by definition, if you’ve got WordPress installed, you’ve got PHP installed, and you can code whatever you like around the standard WordPress theme code. The work has been done by Lancaster-based Netfundi, who have a well-established relationship with DCLG.
13 Dec 2010

e-government

cabinetoffice, drupal

Cabinet Office heralds shift to Drupal

Make no mistake about it: today’s launch of the new Cabinet Office website isn’t just a much-needed facelift for the least usable departmental site in Whitehall. It’s a signal of things to come.

The new site is pretty, modern, and at first glance, very well put-together. There’s evidence of planning for re-use, with the simultaneous launch of a nearly-but-not-quite identical website for the Deputy Prime Minister. Good integration of social stuff, and multiple RSS feeds. And all built on an open-source publishing platform. Specifically, Drupal.

I’ve been sensing a steady shift towards Drupal at the Cabinet Office (and in its immediate vicinity) for some time now; and in fact, I’m told this project has been running since before the election, not always smoothly either. But things can only have been accelerated by the arrival of the Conservative team – including Rishi Saha, who masterminded the MyConservatives.com system, also built on Drupal.

Now the Drupal platform is in place, don’t be at all surprised to see Downing Street going down the same road; ‘practise what you preach’ and all that, given Martha Lane Fox’s pronouncements on the desirability of (total) web convergence. And then?

I’m delighted to see them coming over to open-source: a move, of course, effectively announced by Francis Maude back in June. Of course it would have been nice if it had been WordPress rather than Drupal, for reasons I’ve written about before. But that’s no reason not to welcome this as another step forward. Good on them; and I hope it works out. We’ll find out how much it cost in a matter of weeks, no doubt.
3 Dec 2010

e-government

cabinetoffice, skunkworks

Confirmed: skunkworks running late

The Cabinet Office’s latest structural reform plan admits that they’ve missed the November 2010 target for establishing a ‘government skunkworks’… but there is progress to report.

Good progress has been made on IT skunk works with development lead appointed, a concept developed and a CIO-Council led initiative in place to help shape development of skunk works as part of their remit to set the way ICT projects and programmes are planned, designed, procured and managed.

No actual date, though. Anyone know who the development lead is?
2 Dec 2010

e-government

skunkworks

Skunkworks status update

I think I had my first Mr Kipling’s mince pie of the festive season as long ago as September. Yes, it had the festive holly on the top; and amusingly, it had a best before date well before 25 December. But now, with two doors open on the advent calendars, I can now confirm it’s officially December. So where’s our IT government skunkworks?

As I noted back in June, the project to form a crack IT development team at arms-length from ‘proper’ IT, action point 1.12.iv to be specific, was due to be completed by the end of November. The transparency.number10.gov.uk website is still listing it as ‘in progress’, due for completion in November.

So I’m grateful to Mark O’Neill for tweeting me in the direction of this event next week at the Institute for Government, which promises ‘an opportunity to explore the Skunkworks project – an initiative from the Cabinet Office being rolled out to develop faster and cheaper ways to develop IT applications.’ Mark will be speaking at the event, as will DWP’s Steve Dover, and a representative of ‘Agile specialists’ IndigoBlue (whose website runs on Drupal, by the way).
26 Nov 2010

e-government

cabinetoffice

Now Matt Tee resigns too

Mark Flanagan, Jayne Nickalls, John Suffolk, Alex Butler, Andrew Stott… now Matt Tee.

The Cabinet Office has announced that the Permanent Secretary Government Communications is to ‘undertake a review of the Central Office of Information (COI) and the coordination of cross-department marketing and communications’ – and then head for the exit himself. The review will be completed in January, and Tee will be gone by the end of March.

Martha Lane Fox’s review of Directgov rightly won praise for being concise and plain-spoken. Tee has also shown a similar fondness for brevity and bluntness – as exemplified by his recent review of Arsenal’s second-half performance against Spurs.

[blackbirdpie url=”http://twitter.com/#!/matttee/status/5994919629946880″]

Update 1: now confirmed via Twitter. I wouldn’t read too much into it. But then again…

[blackbirdpie url=”http://twitter.com/#!/matttee/status/8187162335903745″]

Update 2: A copy of Tee’s resignation letter has come into my possession. Here are some of the juicier passages:

I will not be replaced as Permanent Secretary, but the importance of strong leadership of the profession is understood and arrangements will be announced before I leave.

The planned review of COI and the Lane-Fox review of digital bring us rapidly to some big conclusions. Many of us have discussed the changes that need to happen – indeed many of us think they are overdue. A far greater focus on effectiveness and value for money; more partnerships with brand and media owners; a greater focus on audiences rather than departmental brands; a different relationship with the industry; and a clarity about those things that only Government can do.

The work to reconfigure parts of Government communication, including COI, and to make very significant savings in departmental communications will be very challenging. I recognise that it will be difficult to justify a Permanent Secretary role as head of a smaller communications profession and I am going to seek fresh challenges after overseeing the review of COI and the transition for Government communications.

It has been a privilege to be Permanent Secretary for Government Communication. I hope that I have led the profession through challenging times to a place where communication is well placed to justify the resource we know it deserves. But be under no misapprehension, the argument still needs to be made.
24 Nov 2010

e-government

directgov, marthalanefox

You say you want a revolution…

When the Lane Fox review proposed ‘a new central team in Cabinet Office in absolute control of the overall user experience across all digital channels, commissioning all government online information from other departments’, we may all have misread it. There’s a must-read comment on Steph Gray’s post reviewing the review by Tom Loosemore, who played in a role in the review. He writes:

The *last* thing that needs to happen is for all online publishing to be centralised into one humungous, inflexible, inefficient central team doing everything from nots to bolts from a bunker somewhere deep in Cabinet Office. The review doesn’t recommend that. Trust me! It does, as you spotted, point towards a model which is closer to the BBC – a federated commissioning approach, where ‘commissioning’ is more akin to the hands-off commissioning of a TV series, rather than micro-commissioning as per a newspaper editor.

With that one contribution, the proposal is cast in a very different light. And maybe it isn’t as crazy as it all sounded this morning. Sighs of relief all round.

I do firmly believe that there are appropriate role models, and appropriate technical solutions, to allow government web publishing to be consolidated satisfactorily – for all concerned. Yes, the BBC is a fine example, but Whitehall already has its own examples. BIS has done it – see a PQ answer, coincidentally published the same day as the review, in which it rightly trumpets the savings made by bringing all its partner organisations on to the same platform, under the same ‘unifying navigation bar’. (And among my own clients, Defra is on its way to doing it.)

It’s easy to imagine a WordPress¹ multisite install, with Super Admin rights kept to a central team, a few custom (and customisable) themes, and a carefully selected set of plugins. Child site administrators wouldn’t be permitted to add new code; but would still have considerable freedom within those permitted boundaries. The themes (and indeed, WordPress itself) would enforce certain technological standards and methods, including – you’d imagine – a family bar across the top of each screen, a standard layout, the same font, good and consistent accessibility approaches, etc etc.

So in principle, yes, it’s absolutely possible… and could meet all four Lane Fox objectives. I dearly hope it can. But I share the mild scepticism of Steph Gray’s concluding paragraph: ‘There’s much to like in Martha’s report, and a real opportunity to make things better. If it’s done right.’ The thing is, twice in the past decade, with DotP and then The Club, it’s been tried – and since everyone still isn’t on a shared platform, you have to conclude it was done wrong.

This new vision will be dependent on the formation of a centre of genuine expertise, whether ‘absolute’-ly powerful or not, in the Cabinet Office. The same Cabinet Office who produced the report as a 5.7MB graphic-based PDF file, whose text was neither searchable nor selectable (for which, to give him his dues, Tom Loosemore has apologised – ‘no excuse’). The same Cabinet Office whose own news ‘child’ website failed to even mention the review’s publication (since corrected). So, some way to go, you’d have to say.

[blackbirdpie url=”http://twitter.com/demsoc/status/7007089071235072″]

And I wonder whether it ultimately requires a dramatic culture change of abandoning separate Departmental identities, including separate press operations. Francis Maude sat on the report for a very long time, before eventually publishing it (apparently) unaltered. Did he find it a tough sell to his ministerial colleagues? That would certainly explain why the response has been to form a new ministerial committee.

The Directgov CEO is walking out. So is the government CIO, explicitly named as the one to lead the development of the shared platform. Not to mention the retiring Director of Digital Engagement. So, to whoever finds this landing on their desk… I wish you good luck. And I assure you, there remains a lot of goodwill ‘out here’.

¹ I’m sure it would be possible to do likewise on any number of other CMSes, but I doubt any are quite as good as WordPress at providing flexibility to the child site admins.
23 Nov 2010

e-government

cabinetoffice, directgov, francismaude, marthalanefox

Lane Fox report published; does Cabinet Office share her revolutionary zeal?
Martha Lane Fox’s review of Directgov has been published this morning – as an 11 page, 5.7MB graphic-based PDF file, making it impossible to search or select text. (Thanks to various colleagues on Twitter for confirming it wasn’t just me.) Its key recommendations, pretty much as anticipated:
The document is entitled ‘Revolution not evolution’ – but that’s certainly not the tone of the Cabinet Office press release, which describes the proposals in the most anodyne form imaginable. Where Martha talks about recruiting a ‘CEO for Digital’, and giving him/her ‘absolute’ power, the press release talks about an ‘Executive Director’ – note the immediate switch to Civil Service speak – whose job will be to ‘drive change and bring together existing teams working in this area’. And the press release’s line about ‘asking Directgov and Business Link to create a plan of what would be involved to converge the sites into a single domain’ seems two or three steps removed from actually demanding that it happens pronto.

The most provocative proposal in the document is surely the plan to consolidate everything into Directgov:

A new central commissioning team should take responsibility for the overall user experience on the government web estate, and should commission content from departmental experts. This content should then be published to a single Government website with a consistently excellent user experience.

Ultimately, departments should stop publishing to their own websites, and instead produce only content commissioned by this central commissioning team. There is no need for a major migration of content from existing departmental websites, they should simply be archived or mothballed when essential content has been commissioned and included in the new site.

But Francis Maude’s letter in response – quite rightly – takes a very cautious view of the work involved, and its implications… and almost seems to be kicking it into the long grass.

I agree in principle with your proposal that over time Government should move to a single domain based on agile web shared web services. However, as your report makes clear, this will be challenging for Government and I will need to consult colleagues before we make a final decision about how to proceed. To take these and other cross government issues forward, I intend to set up a new Ministerial Working Group on Digital reporting to the Cabinet Economic Affairs Committee.

Notable by its absence from the review is NHS Choices. Martha’s ‘shared service’ vision shows Directgov, Business Link, ‘departmental teams’, a Central Newsroom (CO/No10) and ‘digital engagement teams’ all feeding the Directgov brand/domain – but there’s no reference to the third of the three supersites. I spotted the other day that NHS Choices is being openly reticent about getting involved in the G-Digital project: the one-page overview on the G-Digital site notes that ‘NHS Choices are represented on the G-Digital Project Board and are considering how they can best utilise the project.’

And whilst the Maude response talks about ‘simplifying the governance of Directgov’, there’s no specific reference to the fate of its management board.

That’s my report on the publication itself; I’ll reflect on the proposals later. In the meantime, here’s what Steph Gray thinks… and he’s bang on.
22 Nov 2010

e-government

directgov, marthalanefox

Lane Fox plans for government web revealed

A document published on a non-departmental gov.uk site appears to have lifted the lid on Martha Lane Fox’s plans for UK government web publishing. The document, published as an unrestricted PDF, is a review of the website of the organisation in question. But given the ongoing Lane Fox review, its author provides a helpfully concise summary of what may lie ahead.

[Lane Fox] is recommending that Directgov should expand in scope to become the government front end for all transactions, with the ability to mandate departments to meet standards they set; she is also recommending the establishment of a central team in the Cabinet Office in charge of commissioning all online government information, led by a CEO for digital to direct all online government spending. There has been no formal response from the Government to her proposals, but it reflects an overall trend for centralisation and standardisation of government online information and services.

A copy of Lane Fox’s letter to Francis Maude, dated 16 October, was attached to the document in question; but, sadly, has not been included in the online copy. It does at least indicate that the plans have already been widely circulated around the Civil Service.

For the record, the PDF in question appears (at the time of writing) in the first few pages of Google search results for ‘martha lane fox directgov review’.