A fairly soft launch today for the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills’s new corporate blog: built by Steph Gray (obviously), using WordPress (naturally).
Taking a quick whizz round the Cabinet table, the departments now running formal, properly-designated corporate ‘blogs’ are:
- FCO (using Roller)
- MOD (Typepad)
- BIS (WordPress)
- DECC (WordPress)
- Health (WordPress)
- DFID (WordPress) and
- DCMS (Movable Type).
Additionally, of course, there are a few corporate sites which are actually running on blog technology, but choose not to present themselves as blogs – notably Number10, Defra, and the Wales Office; plus various blogs for teams and projects, too many to list here, and occasional Ministerial contributions to the Tories’ Blue Blog.
Responses
Ahem, there are also ministerial contributions on LibDemVoice too – WordPress also naturally 🙂
Don’t forget UKTI!
http://blog.ukti.gov.uk/
A quick point: you say ‘obviously’ by me, but of course procurement rules still apply etc etc.
The theme is actually a migration/rebuild of old work that I for BIS while an employee, which has been floating around staging environments for a while. The actual cost of this project was covered within maintenance hours we have agreed for supporting BIS WordPress projects, and was – by my standards even – somewhat uncomfortably low 🙂
Surely a uncomfortable pleasure Steph?? 🙂
Oddly yes (though it did cost a Saturday)
Glad you got in there with that clarification Steph; and thanks for the post Simon. Will try to share some of the back story/thinking behind it with a post of my own later, kids allowing. It is indeed a v soft launch, and early days. But as you can see from the intro blurb, we’re hoping to get lots of voices on there. Am v conscious of the traps of corporate blogs.
Would be interested to know which of the corp blogs you list here or have seen outside our walle garden you think are doing best on content and strategy, engaging with readers
Didn’t mean to suggest any contractual impropriety, Steph. Sorry.
Mark – ministerial interventions on LDV are very rare though, to be fair; Prime, Cabinet and junior ministers’ contributions are much more common on the Blue Blog.
And Dave, sorry, but UKTI falls into the ‘various others, too many to list’ category. I consciously restricted my list solely to Cabinet-level departments.
To be fair to Dave (first time for everything), UKTI is a non-ministerial department with a global staff of 2,400 – in all probability it’s represented in Cabinet by both the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills and the Foreign Secretary.
And for the purposes of making a list of corporate blogs in central govt, it’s got to be a significant member of any list.