Work
Death of the web team?
Where does responsibility for digital communications sit within a large organisation? That used to be a fairly easy question (“In the web team of course!”) but it’s not so simple any more. These days, it begs two rather more difficult questions: which bit of digital and what kind of responsibility do you mean? Digital communications [...]
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 [...]
Digging digital government: recent major works and what they mean
Major works by Whitehall webbies in the past six weeks have repeatedly got top billing on No 10′s legendary grid, and even made front page news. This feels very different from even a year ago, when web teams had to work hard just to get their voices heard on the importance of the web for [...]
A better website guaranteed?
The Export Credits Guarantee Department (ECGD) relaunched its website yesterday …and fans of this blog might instantly notice it bears one or two similarities to the Department for Business site my team launched back in March. That’s because ECGD are the first customer for the BIS shared web service, using the ready-made templates and CMS [...]
So what did Steph Gray ever do for us?
Today the man they call @lesteph is leaving the Civil Service to work on… well, other le stuff. Read about it in his own words here. I’ve spent the best part of a year working alongside him since the creation of BIS brought our two teams together in June 2009. If you’re reading this blog [...]
Radio silence
A reminder that in line with propriety guidance for civil servants during a general election I’ll be fairly quiet here and on Twitter until a government is formed after 6 May. If I do post stuff, it will be about things other than work. Normal (sporadic) service will resume afterwards.
Under construction: behind the scenes of a government website (soft) launch
Website launches aren’t what they used to be. Back in the day, the birth or re-birth of a website would be heralded with a big ‘welcome’ story on the homepage, a press release, a section gushing about its new and improved features (probably none of which anyone had said they wanted) and – if you [...]
Fantasy CMS for government
The good doctor‘s brilliant piece on the tyranny of content management systems has spurred me on to write this post I’ve been contemplating for a while, about my own frustrations with WCMS software and what an ideal platform for government websites might be capable of right out of the box. Having been close to the [...]
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. 
