wordpress – Page 8

14 May 2010

company, e-government, technology

coi, defra, mikelittle, wordpress

Our emergency theme helps Defra relaunch

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 all gone commendably smoothly.

But one or two departments have taken advantage of the situation to revamp their web presences: and it’s been our pleasure to assist with one of these already – with more, perhaps, to follow.

In the run-up to Polling Day, we were asked by COI to provide cover for any ’emergency’ web building which might result from the arrival of a new administration. Steria provided a hosting environment, with WordPress MU pre-installed; and I worked with Zed1’s Mike Little to develop a theme which could be deployed and managed centrally, ideally very rapidly – but still be easily customisable for each individual site which used it.

In the end, there weren’t any major Machinery of Government changes which required it: but Defra recognised the opportunity, and are using it as a base on which to start rebuilding their corporate website. They’ve worked with Puffbox on a few WordPress-based microsites already this year, so it’s familiar territory for them – and in truth, I think it’s been coming for a while.

The theme is fairly plain, sober and generic: inevitably, given that we had literally no idea who might need to use it, or how. There’s a rather nice homepage carousel, managed via the WP media library; a widget-ised sidebar and ‘fat footer’; plus special page menus at the top and bottom. It makes for quite a nice little site: certainly enough to get things started.

But whilst the design itself might not win awards, the behind-the-scenes stuff is pretty smart. We’ve enabled WordPress’s ‘custom header’ functionality on the theme: users simply need to create a graphic of predefined dimensions, upload it into WP, and it’ll be used as a full-width banner across the top (with the search form and – optionally – department name overlaid). In Defra’s case, they’ve gone for a fairly plain black logo on white; but it could have been a lot more creative if they’d wanted. When we’ve tried this in test, we’ve found it can produce quite dramatically different ‘feels’ to the theme.

And then there’s the colour palette. The theme’s style.css file avoids defining most of the colours used on the page. Instead, there’s an options page in the WordPress backend, where you can enter the colours to be used for specific page elements: links, the ‘blobs’ in the sidebar and ‘fat footer’, and so on. These are saved in the database table of options for that specific blog only; and the custom CSS gets added to the top of each page as it gets generated. (It’s effectively an evolution of the work I did for BIS on Science & Society, but it takes the concept to a whole new level, and opens up all sorts of possibilities.)

But of course, the most significant aspect is the centrally managed hosting environment, and the official recognition of WordPress as a suitable tool for the job. Precisely what I’ve been proposing on these pages for ages. And you know what? I think it actually worked.
4 May 2010

e-government, technology

government, wordpress

Why WordPress is a good fit for government

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 all my government clients over the past week or so, just checking that I was going to be around in case of changes needing to be made. And that’s before we get into the short-term chaos of any large-scale departmental reconfiguration.

All of which makes it a good moment for a blog post I’ve been meaning to write for some time now, on the subject of WordPress in government.

I’ve been banging the WordPress drum up and down Whitehall since late 2007. At first, it was small tactical builds: the Darzi NHS Review in November, followed by the Wales Office in February 08. From there, over the road to Downing Street, and thence to half of central government departments – thanks in no small part to Steph Gray’s Commentariat theme, first published in February 09.

So what exactly is it about WordPress in particular, that makes it so attractive for government in particular?

Cuts out (the worst excesses of) procurement: In my experience, procurement teams are very good at explaining why their role is crucial, and why they need to be invited to all your meetings. But when the best available product is available free of charge, you can instantly cut out a large portion of your project schedule.

Cheaper and friendlier suppliers: So far at least, WordPress has been the domain of the small-scale agency, or even the solo operator. We don’t have tiers of business analysts and project managers. We don’t have CMS solutions we built at significant expense several years ago, from which our product executives are trying to milk every last penny of profit. Generally speaking, the guy you speak to is the guy doing the work. No intermediaries, and minimal overheads.

Speed of implementation: WordPress’s finest hour in government circles surely came in June last year. One Friday, two departments – BERR and DIUS – were unexpectedly forced together by a Cabinet reshuffle. By the Wednesday, and for minimal cash outlay, the newly merged web team had built a WordPress-based site for the new department. An almost incredible achievement, given the usual glacial pace of Whitehall web development. It just shows what can be done.

Focus on content, not process: For me the key strength of WordPress is that, as soon as you log in, you’re looking at an authoring screen. If you haven’t seen many CMSes, that may sound odd. But believe me, most platforms would much rather you waded through several layers of menu before you even get close to writing some words. And that’s what policy officials and press officers are paid to do: not worry about taxonomies or systems admin.

More than you bargained for: Time and again, I find new things WordPress can do, which I hadn’t previously known about. Things I’d never have thought to request in a tech spec; but because someone else did, or because it was a happy bi-product of something else, or because a geek somewhere fancied coding a quick plugin to do it, it’s in the package. And one day, you’ll suddenly be very grateful.

And last, but definitely not least:

The ‘open source’ principle: Open source does mean cheap code, but its true merit lies in what comes next. When government spends public money on IT development, the public has a right to expect to derive the maximum benefit from it – and that can mean so much more than simply getting a prettier or more efficient website out of it. In the same way that taxpayers now have a right to raw data, the same can – and I’d say, should – apply to software development. The use of other people’s code – in the form of themes and plugins – is fundamental to WordPress; and it provides an easy framework to introduce the notion of releasing HMG-commissioned code.

If you’ve ever wondered why I’ve pushed WordPress so hard all these years, the answer is encapsulated in that last point. It represents a gentle introduction to some potentially huge concepts. I’ve seen too many people trying to pitch the concept of open source in philosophical terms; it rarely works. WordPress makes it real, and has already delivered tangible results. And we’ve only just got started.

Footnote: this post was prompted by Dave Briggs’s reference to this video of author and blogger Aaron Brazell talking about ‘WordPress and government’ – which doesn’t really say anything specific to government. Still worth watching though.
26 Apr 2010

company, politics

northernireland, simonwheatley, sluggerotoole, wordpress

Taking Slugger O'Toole to the next level

If you have any interest in Northern Ireland politics, you’ll be familiar with Slugger O’Toole. It’s by far the best known blog in the province, and manages to pull off the impressive feat of appealing to both sides of the sectarian divide – even to the point of winning awards at ceremonies in both the UK and the Republic. And as an Ulster exile myself, it’s a site I’ve followed for a long, long time.

Late last year, Slugger received investment from Channel 4’s 4iP fund, to take things to the next level. In practice, that meant an update to a design that was really showing its age; and a move from Expression Engine to WordPress. But things didn’t work out with their initial Belfast-based designer; and a few weeks ago, they got in touch to see if Puffbox could help. The no1 website from my part of the planet, wanting to move to WordPress? How could I possibly refuse?

The brief was to reflect the rough and robust nature of the site’s conversations; and pretty quickly,we found a visual style which seemed to strike the right note. But when it came to wireframing, we hit an interesting question: did Slugger want to be more of a blog or a news site?

Our initial templates were definitely more bloggy in nature, but they just didn’t feel right. Like a lot of sites, Slugger’s traffic has always been driven by news events. And as I think I’d always suspected deep down, we eventually concluded it had to be more newsy – and started again.

Most of the effort went into the homepage – and specifically the opening frame (or two), which could well be from a newspaper site, if it weren’t for the ‘torn edges’ effect. And therein lies the aspect of the project I’m most proud of: the self-managing ‘front page’.

If it was a newspaper, it would have an editor (or probably several) tasked with choosing the right order for the stories, tweaking the headlines, crafting snappy summaries, selecting suitable imagery, and so on. But Slugger is run by a loose bunch of volunteer contributors, and couldn’t commit to that kind of management overhead. So instead, we’ve programmed WordPress to select the stories, and sort them, based on a number of predefined rules.

It selects stories based on their date of posting, the editor’s manual identification of ‘important’ stories, whether or not it’s got pictures, and most interestingly, the volume of comments. So a story will almost always get some top-of-page exposure when it’s first published, but will soon drop ‘below the fold’. However, if it generates a good number of comments, it will jump back up to the top – and in all likelihood, even higher than before.

Sure, it’s not quite Digg or Google; but I think it’s interesting that the site’s readership can influence the homepage almost as much as the editor. And it seems entirely in keeping with the ethos of a site whose true strength is in its sense of community.

On the technical side, it’s been really pretty tricky. Thousands of already-registered users, tens of thousands of posts, hundreds of thousands of comments – and the server procured by our predecessors on the project just wasn’t up to the task. Things were agonisingly slow on launch day, no matter how many magic tricks Simon Wheatley performed: so we had to make hasty plans to move it somewhere beefier (and as it turned out, cheaper). Thankfully though, we seem to be in calmer waters now.

Knowing the Slugger readership as I did, I feared the worst when it came to reader feedback. In fact, it’s been overwhelmingly positive. People seem to like the visual approach, and appreciate what we’re trying to achieve with it. We’re fixing the (relatively few) bugs which have arisen, and the contributors are getting used to the new interface and the new functions at their disposal. And of course, this is really only the start: having moved everything over into WordPress, all sorts of possibilities now open up.

Several gold stars go to Simon Wheatley, for going far beyond the call of duty on this one; and thanks to Matt at Dunston Graphics, for getting the design just right, and coping admirably with my outrageously late change of strategic direction.
13 Apr 2010

company, politics

libdems, lynnefeatherstone, splashpages, wordpress

Lynne Featherstone making a splash

When we launched the new Lynne Featherstone website back in September, our plan was always to add some new functionality once the campaign finally began (properly). One such feature went live tonight: ‘splash pages’, managed purely within WordPress.

I’ve developed a new custom page template, which – as you can see – expects to be used with a (very) large uploaded image, a paragraph or two of text, and a signup form (powered by Contact Form 7). To activate it, you simply change the ‘front page’ setting on the WordPress back-end.

When you view the page, it drops a cookie to ensure you won’t see that splash page again; but the cookie is specific to the page ID number, so it won’t stop you seeing the next one we do.

The template’s first appearance is to warn potential voters of the upcoming deadline for registration; so we’ve had to go abstract with the choice of imagery. Most of the time, I’d expect it to be a photograph – not least given Lynne’s recent recognition as the country’s most fanciable MP. WordPress has allowed us to make the page creation process remarkably quick and easy; so I’m hoping the team will be able to create a couple each week of the campaign, depending on events and available imagery.

By definition, splash pages are an annoyance – an unrequested interruption to your online journey. I’m not a fan of injudicious use of them. But based on this template, Lynne’s should be more substantial and useful than most; and we’re doing our best to minimise the inconvenience with persistent cookies. We’ll be watching to see how they are received.
12 Apr 2010

company, politics

chrishuhne, libdems, lynnefeatherstone, wordpress

Our new site for LibDems' Chris Huhne

With the election now well and truly underway, it’s high time I blogged about the latest website Puffbox has built for a high-profile Liberal Democrat – this time it’s home affairs spokesman Chris Huhne, as he looks to defend a wafer-thin majority in Eastleigh.

We were approached by Huhne’s team late last year: they’d seen what we’d done for Lynne Featherstone, and wanted us to do something similar for them. We soon ruled out a ‘carbon copy’ site: Lynne’s use of social media is exceptional, and the approach we took with her wasn’t going to be appropriate for Chris. Instead, we’ve shaped the site around Chris’s rather more conventional media output, but with plenty of scope to expand later, if or when required.

We’ve gone for a high-impact homepage, with a large image carousel highlighting a number of key local issues: and as with Lynne Featherstone’s site, each issue has its own explanatory page which can act as a hub for related posts. Unlike Lynne though, a large proportion of Chris’s work is at national level – so we’ve gone for a tabbed approach, allowing you to switch between national and local issues. (And using cookies, we’ll remember your preference for your next visit.)

Since his election in 2005, Chris had been running a website based on the Prater Raines platform used by the vast majority of Liberal Democrat people and local parties. (It’s actually an excellent technical solution; but it won’t win any design awards.) We’ve managed to bring across the vast majority of the previous site’s content, close to 1,000 pages, by screen-scraping: and whilst the new page addresses aren’t exact matches, they do all work seamlessly.

The site was built on WordPress, with just a little behind-the-scenes help from Simon Wheatley; it was designed in collaboration with Matt Budd of Dunston Graphics. I think he’s done a magnificent job with the LibDems’ somewhat troublesome preference for aqua and yellow.

There are a few areas, in both technical and editorial terms, where I wish we’d had just a little more time; but the declaration of the election forced our hand somewhat. So whilst I’m more than happy with what we’ve already delivered, I think we can make it even better in the months to come. Assuming the voters of Eastleigh give us the chance…
9 Apr 2010

company, e-government

defra, taxonomy, wordpress

Our new Defra site plays nicely with PDFs

In the late March dash to complete jobs before the end of the financial year, not to mention the imminent election declaration, I pushed a couple of websites live without having the time to blog about them.

One of these was another little job for Defra: a WordPress-based satellite site for their Science Advisory Council. It’s a fairly modest site, sticking very closely to Defra’s house style, and based to a significant extent on previous work I’ve done for them. But it does have one innovation worth flagging.

The site’s main objective is transparency, making documents from its quarterly meetings publicly available. Inevitably, like it or not, that means a lot of PDF files. WordPress’s media library function makes it easy to upload these as attachments to posts (or indeed, pages): but we had the idea to take things a step further.

One underused feature of WordPress is the ability to add ‘custom taxonomies’: distinct classifications based on either the (hierarchical) category or (freeform) tagging model. But if you’re smart about it, you can also hook this same functionality into the media library – allowing you to add ‘tags’ to the documents you upload. And once you’re doing that, you can benefit from all the other features you’re used to with tags and categories.

So there’s a page on the SAC site which presents this custom taxonomy (unimaginatively labelled ‘Upload tags’) as a tag cloud. Click on a tag, and it takes you to an archive page of all uploads (ie PDFs) relevant to that tag – eg meeting minutes – which can be based on a special page template. (And you can also get RSS feeds of each element in the custom taxonomy, by adding ‘/feed’ to the URL in the usual way.)

We’ve also written a routine into the standard post template to extract details of attached files, and present them automatically in a nice table, with a bit of automated metadata too – see this page as an example.

There are plenty of reasons why you shouldn’t rely on PDF as your primary publishing channel; but sometimes, you have to accept it’s the only practical solution. And in this case, I hope we’ve shown it’s possible to make something of a virtue of it.
30 Mar 2010

company, e-government, technology

careandsupport, simonwheatley, wordpress

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 great relationship with the team at the Department of Health, and we’ve done some fun, innovative and highly effective things: commentable documents, Facebook activity, online questionnaires, even user-submitted photo galleries.

The consultation process is reaching its conclusion, with the publication of the government White Paper on the subject. (For those who don’t know the jargon: a ‘green paper’ presents options or starts a debate, often leading to a ‘white paper’, which is a declaration of government policy.) Oh, and as you might have noticed, there’s an election on the cards, and we’ve already had a few skirmishes on this very subject.

When we first met to discuss plans for the White Paper publication, one idea was to ‘live tweet’ the launch event on Twitter; but I’ve never been a fan of sudden, frantic bursts of tweeting by one of the hundred-odd accounts I follow. (And indeed, I’ve ‘unfollowed’ certain people for doing precisely that.) So we reworked the plan, taking as our inspiration the undoubted success of the BBC’s ‘live text commentaries’ – seen at its best on the sports site on a Saturday afternoon, but used with increasing frequency on the news site, for set-piece events like PMQs.

So over lunchtime, we’ll be supplementing our live video stream with a live text commentary – using ajax and some custom WordPress wizardry. It’s a very simple concept at heart. A live commentary is just a chronologically-presented series of short text chunks… just like a list of comments on a post. So that’s what we’re going to use.

The site editor will be entering his comments via a hidden, ajax-powered comment form: and, as with any WordPress comment, he’ll benefit from features like automatic text formatting, including conversion of URLs into clickable links. Meanwhile, users will see each new comment appended to the bottom of the list, with a cute colour highlight, but without the need for a full page refresh.

Naturally, this means a much increased workload for the web server, particularly if – as we expect – we attract a sizable audience for what looks like being front-page news. WordPress and its plugin collection can do a lot to help; but we’ve taken a few additional server-level steps to ensure all runs smoothly. All the credit for this goes to my regular collaborator Simon Wheatley, who knows a thing or two about these things, thanks in part to his work for Stephen Fry.

There are plenty of options for running live text commentaries like this, such as the excellent CoverItLive. But there are a number of benefits to running it within WordPress: not least the fact that afterwards, you’ll instantly have a bullet-point summary of the key points at your disposal. And as we’ve been building the functionality, we’ve been getting quite excited at other ways we could use it.

If you’re at a keyboard at lunchtime, please drop by, and let me know how you find it.
25 Mar 2010

e-government, technology

downingstreet, telegraph, wordpress

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 in its code header.
- It has a pretty curious set of ‘meta keywords’ – including ‘piercings’, ‘tattoos’ and ‘polish armed forces’. (Update: apparently not random at all – see comment below.)
- The page templates aren’t especially well structured for SEO purposes.
- It has inconsistent names on various external sites like Twitter, YouTube and Flickr.
None of which, in my mind, constitute a ‘technical mess’. So it’s interesting to see, this morning, that the headline has been watered down, to mock the keyword selection.

Some of the criticisms are valid. The site could do a few simple things to improve its SEO standing, probably taking barely a few minutes. And yes, I have trouble remembering which specific configuration of ‘downing’ and ‘st(reet)’ it uses to make up its various usernames. But some of the accusations are way over the top, and some don’t stand up at all.

The ‘meta keywords’ criticism, for example. In the old days, search engines respected the keywords you entered in your page header as a guide to the page’s substance. But then people, possibly working in the field of ‘audience development’, began abusing them. So what does Google, with 90% of the UK search market, think about meta keywords?

Let’s ask Google’s Matt Cutts, shall we?

His answer: they don’t use it. ‘Basically not at all… Even in the least little bit.’ Not worth spending much time on then, I’d say.

And then there’s the failure to rank highly for certain budget-related search terms. But would you want or expect Number10 to be a high-ranking result, when it has very little material on the subject – and isn’t the ‘lead site’ on the subject, from either a policy (HM Treasury) or a citizen-facing (Directgov) perspective?

If you search Google right now for ‘budget’, you’ll get both HMT and DG in the top few results. That’s the appropriate outcome.

I’m not saying there aren’t improvements I’d want to make to the Number10 site. As regular readers may know, I contributed some advice in the early days of their migration to WordPress – but I didn’t have any hands-on involvement in the build itself. If I had, for the record, certain things would have been done differently.

PS: Thankfully, someone at the Telegraph saw sense, and dropped the ‘technical mess’ line. Otherwise I’d be forced to point out that their article page scores 88 HTML validation errors in the W3C checker, compared to the Number10 homepage’s zero.
24 Mar 2010

politics

conservatives, transparency, wordpress

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 when they’re submitted – citing a desire to protect the ‘anonymity [of] those who have sensitive insights’. It turns WordPress into an inbox filtering application, in effect: recording people’s submissions against the page to which they related, but not really doing anything more than that. Nothing wrong with that approach, just a little curious.

Again, I applaud the Tory team’s ingenuity here. But… writing on the Conservatives’ Blue Blog yesterday, Jeremy Hunt said:

We will be publishing it online in an easy-to-read format (not like the enormous PDF documents so beloved of the Treasury) as soon as possible after its release.

Now, there’s a lot wrong with publishing stuff purely in PDF files – and there’s a lot right about doing this site in WordPress. But PDFs have several huge benefits which this image-based site can’t match. Copy-and-paste, search, screen-reading, search engine indexing… etc. Plus, without wishing to be too pedantic: if ‘enormous’ is a reference to file sizes, the Treasury’s 3.5MB PDF file equates to significantly less than 230 JPG images of roughly 150kB each.

Leaving aside the technicals, this is a very interesting initiative on several levels. There’s the ‘crowdsourcing’ aspect, of course; but there’s also an underlying message – that Labour will be trying to sneak the nasty things through in small print on page 186. They do, after all, have a certain amount of form on this.

So is this a declaration that under the Conservatives, they’ll tell it to us straight – good and bad? I sincerely hope so.
21 Mar 2010

politics, technology

libdems, lynnefeatherstone, seo, wordpress

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 search query if you just type in ‘hari’ – here‘s what you (currently) get:

So the first five results on a standard Google results page are: two pages from the council itself – the council’s own homepage and one of its most popular individual pages (as you’d normally expect for such a targeted query); a page from Wikipedia; a page from Directgov; and at slot number 5, LibDem MP Lynne’s automated page detailing everything that’s wrong with the Labour-run council… with a particularly arresting excerpt.

SEO, or Search Engine Optimisation, isn’t something I typically find myself paying much (conscious) attention to. In my experience, it’s usually enough to have followed the basics of web page construction: and I’ve been coding HTML for 15 years now, so it’s all fairly instinctive. WordPress helps by encouraging you to use significant elements such as the page title – presumably including significant keywords – in both the HTML <title> and the page URL; plus there are a couple of plugins I tend to activate for all clients which help Google ranking, install instantly, and never trouble you again.

But because it’s baked into the process, albeit subconsciously, the results are there to be seen: and will come to the fore over the next few weeks.

Naturally, with an election imminent, MPs and candidates are looking for every possible opportunity to get their messages in front of voters and journalists. For zero extra effort, and at zero cost, we’re getting one of Lynne’s core messages in front of the tens of thousands of people searching for ‘haringey council’ each month. (According to Google’s Adwords keyword tool, 22,200 people searched for ‘haringey council’ in February 2010… far more than the 1,300 who searched for ‘lynne featherstone’ specifically.)

Lynne is defending a relatively modest majority of 2,395 – notionally putting her in Labour’s no39 target seat. We’ve had plenty of favourable feedback regarding her website already: Iain Dale, I’m reliably informed, called it one of the best political websites he’d ever seen. But it won’t surprise you to learn that we’re looking at a couple of possible enhancements for the election campaign period. Stay tuned.