Whitehall Webby

I promised to give you some detail about our new website, so here it is, part 1.
None of the team working on the Department of Constitutional Affairs website were involved in its initial development or design. While it was a big improvement on it’s predecessor its architecture was a problem for those of us who inherited it – the navigation pretty much mirrored the organisational structure at the time and as this changed over time due to machinery of government changes, the technical construction of the site made it difficult for us to reflect this in the navigation.

We had a pretty good idea who our primary audience is from user research and feedback – practitioners in the sectors we serve (especially legal professionals), but the media and researchers are also important groups for us.

Continue reading “Background to the Ministry of Justice website part 1”

While others have been sunning (?) themselves and taking advantage of the bank holiday weekend, we have been in the office putting finishing touches to our new corporate website, due for launch on Wednesday. Its been a bit of a slog what with long hours and way too much coffee but we’re nearly done. Its a vast improvement on the current incarnation, both in visual look, quality of editorial and technical build.

Can’t wait to show the world (will they notice?).

We’re not brilliant at analyzing site user stats in our department for a number of reasons; we don’t really have the expertise for sophisticated drilling down into the data, we don’t have enough people to dedicate a single person to the job, we’re too busy keeping our sites afloat, when people higher up the food chain or in parliament ask us for information they invariably want to know how many ‘hits’ and how much it all cost.

We also have various commitments and undertakings as part of government to make information available online so in that context, how important are topline figures?

The answer today was ‘more important than anything else you are currently doing’. Right in the middle of preparing for the most important site launch my team has worked on in the last three years I received a request for information that cannot be ignored.

Although we regularly log and interrogate data for our main site, we don’t need to look at the stats for some of our smaller sites on quite such a frequent basis – until someone demands to know. So I spent a great chunk of today wrestling with our web statistics application trying to answer the question – and so avoid dragging any of the team away from more important activities.

Ho hum, all part of the service!