British Hallmarking joins BIS web platform
I just can’t resist blogging these before and after shots.
The British Hallmarking Council website relaunched yesterday on the Department for Business platform which – as I am intent on banging on about – was designed by my team as a shared service for BIS and all its partner bodies.
Here’s what their website looked like until yesterday:
And here’s how it looks now:
It’s not all about look and feel, clearly – I’m happy to say BHC has worked hard on improving the content too. But as far as it matters, this design really works; and curiously it works slightly better than the main BIS site whose templates it shares.
There are a few snagging issues to iron out, including some new ones I’ve spotted tonight while writing this post, but all in all it’s a dramatic improvement and I’m chalking this up as another success for the team.
(BHC, in case you’re wondering, are the folks who look after the classification of precious metals and not, as someone joked to me today, anything to do with greetings cards).
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Comments
‘Tis good. What’s interesting too is not just that it’s a nice site (I love the news page: http://www.bis.gov.uk/britishhallmarkingcouncil/new) but that it cost the partner probably an order of magnitude less than a new standalone site would have done, and several orders of magnitude less than a site with that level of CMS functionality and hosting would have done.
When converging sites, it’s fairly easy to skin-and-link (as it’s known in the trade), or just hack an old site down to a few pages within the parent CMS, but this approach delivers a site with its own identity, which meets all government rules at low cost, and which gives the BHC folk a platform to do their own digital engagement.
Good work BIS webbies!
[...] arguably the more significant launch of the week Neil has blogged about on his site. Quietly, Neil and his team have built an enterprise-strength shared hosting platform and [...]
Hello, I'm Neil Williams. I'm a government web geek, a dad, a husband, a grower of veg, a keeper of hens and a lapsed comedy writer, roughly in that order. 
@neillyneil Great job by you and the BIS team!!
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