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 [...]
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 [...]
The perfect page…
A lot of my focus at work lately has been about how we publish to the web – who’s doing it, with what tools, and to what standard. While the boss is focusing on what goes up when and how to make it more engaging, I’m mainly working on three things: building the platform: merging [...]
Found/interesting: 9 Nov to 24 Dec
I haven’t done one of these bookmark posts in a while, and I’m some way off posting anything new here. So here’s a look at what I found interesting enough to bookmark recently. The state of the UK gov blogosphere – Great post by Dave Briggs. Why websites matter less and less – “Summary: Our [...]
How to read minds and influence people
Knowing what your customers are thinking is the first step towards making them happy. But how do you know what’s in their heads (without being Derren Brown)? I’m some way closer to being able to read my website users’ minds than I was this time last week – thanks to two unrelated events which turned [...]
Found/interesting: 15 October to 7 November
Look what I found interesting enough to bookmark recently: BBC Democracy Live – Nifty live political TV and news thingummy via Simon Dickson. JobFact – community of anonymous employees – Compare your salary anonymously. Optimal Workshop – online card sorting tool – Fantastic and free online IA toys. Cybersoc.com: guide to using social media (in [...]
Beyond cut and paste: the professional skills every government web publisher should have
Control-A, Control-C, Control-V. Anyone can do that, right? So we can give our web publishing work to a few junior staff, train them on the software (a nice little development opportunity, bless) and get them to just bung whatever we send them up on the site. If you work in website management for a large [...]
Transforming online government: thoughts about the Federal Web Managers Council white paper
The heads of web in US government agencies have produced this 3-page white paper for Obama’s transition team, campaigning for radical transformation of the gov web estate. Or in their words, to “build on the groundswell of citizen participation in the presidential campaign and make people’s everyday interactions with their government easier and more transparent.” [...]
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. 
