The keenest dh.gov.uk watchers amongst you might have noticed that we've started to publish a few bits of official DH content that sit slightly apart from our main corporate website.
We started with a sub-site for the Dilnot Commission - a site for the review of the funding system for care and support in England.
Then we launched Winterwatch, a temporary sub-site we're using to publish weekly data and stats about how the NHS is coping with winter, alongside weekly messages from the Chief Medical Officer.
I mentioned in my last blog the channel we're using to aggregate news and conversations about the modernisation of health and care.
And Kate Billingham's blog about the Family Nurse Partnership - and indeed this blog - fit into the same category.
These examples have one thing in common - they all use same DH WordPress theme.
The Department has actually been publishing commentable docs for a while - we've just widened what we can do with WordPress, and made it more systematic.
We're now benefiting from a few days work we commissioned at the end of last year to enhance our WordPress capabilty. We wanted: a theme we could use to build and manage DH sub-sites for campaigns and our public bodies, a theme for our blogs, something we could use for the communities we intend to create around our email bulletins, something we could use to publish rich editorial features, a blog aggregator, and commentable documents. And although this was expressly not a design project, we wanted something that was on-brand, a step towards a cleaner layout, and something that was neutral enough and flexible enough to work for a changing Department ...so pretty much the moon on a stick.
Fortunately for us we managed to find a young up-and-coming developer who wasn't daunted by the task, was happy to interpret our shifting requirements and suggest better ideas, and who, in the end, managed to deliver a single flexible theme that does everything we wanted, and a bit more.
The work isn't quite finished. Our need to meet new communication requirements quickly, and our own impatience and optimism once we'd seen the prototype, meant that we started using the theme when it was good enough, but before it was really ready.
There are some things that we still need to solve - we know we need to do more to fully integrate the sub-sites with our corporate website, sort out the way search works, and tidy up branding and the way we're using sub-domains. But we've not published recklessly, and I don't think the quality has suffered – the reverse in fact. And it's satisfying to work in this way, learning and improving the way we do it as we go. Much credit to Francis, Sarah and Rosie in particular for making it all possible whilst ensuring that we didn’t drop our standards.
I think our theme will exceed our expectations for it. I don't need to tell you that using a straightforward publishing tool like WordPress is fairly pleasing. Having dipped a toe in, it's tempting to go a bit further than we originally planned. I'll share what we do with it here. And I'd be interested to hear what you think.
6 comments
Comment by Tweets that mention Wordpress – DH dips a toe in | Stephen Hale -- Topsy.com posted on
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Ross Ferguson, Adi and Stephen Hale, PublicSectorBloggers. PublicSectorBloggers said: WordPress – DH dips a toe in: The keenest dh.gov.uk watchers amongst you might have noticed that we’ve started t... http://bit.ly/eUxGAR [...]
Comment by Ryan Edwards posted on
Looks good but where do you draw the site from 'sub sites' to micro sites? The NHS has many 100's of these, many of which need to be culled as part of the government's rationalisation of its digital estate?
Comment by Stephen Hale posted on
What we're trying to do is create a web presence for the Department that has lots of common elements but is also flexible enough for us to do some quite specific things. I think that's where we're heading with rationalisation too (for .gov and .nhs). As we do more of this stuff I hope you'll see that it will all fit nicely together as a coherent web presence. We're definitely not in the business of creates lots of new websites.
Comment by Elizabeth posted on
Great post! Do you happen to know if there is a list of UK (or perhaps even EU) government sites on WordPress? With the new features, it seems to be an option for more public sector sites - and not just blogs. 🙂
Comment by Stephen Hale posted on
Thanks. I don't know if there's an official list but Simon may provide the closest thing to it - he talks a lot about WP/govt stuff on his blog (eg http://puffbox.com/2009/04/27/wordpress-in-uk-government-an-informal-audit/)
Comment by Craig posted on
I'm coming very late into this post, but I'm delighted to discover the DoH are using WordPress.
I've been teasing with the idea myself and feel much more confident that it is the right direction for me to go in.
Imagine if the DHO released a WP Theme for NHS Trusts to use and adapt as required! Shock. The NHS working together. 🙂