Work
Profoundly non-trivial: Martha Lane Fox review of Directgov
A big day today in digital government. In case you missed it, the Martha Lane Fox review of Directgov and the wider government web estate went public along with a response from Cabinet secretary Francis Maude, so ending a period of furtive speculation by those with a keen interest in the way UK government does [...]
More on Disqus and accessibility
A couple of months ago I posted in praise of cheap-as-chips comment engines Echo and Disqus – then followed up pointing out some of the potential downsides. Chief among them was accessibility, and I promised to share the results of an audit commissioned by BIS. Those results are now in, available on Scribd, and are [...]
Making public data pretty with custom CSS
I’ve alluded a few times on this blog to the exceptional flexibility we’ve built into our shared website platform at BIS. It’s something I’m fiercely proud of and which bears repeating – and in that spirit I thought I’d share the latest example: the new BIS data store which went live on Friday alongside this [...]
How do you converge yours?
[Warning. This post contains gratuitous before and after shots of website convergence] There’s more to closing down legacy websites than just assimilating them Borg-style into your main web platform using homogenous, corporate-branded templates. While that is one of the options, it’s at one end of a spectrum which can have many nuanced approaches between that [...]
Embedding third party code: the downsides
I thought I should quickly acknowledge a few responses I’ve had to my previous post on using 3rd party plugins like Disqus and Echo, pointing out some of the downsides. As well as this comment from Simon I’ve had two emails politely highlighting issues which – though nowhere near outweighing the benefits in my view [...]
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. 
