We made some big changes to DH’s digital operations last week, though hopefully hardly anyone will have noticed...
On Wednesday morning we migrated our wordpress subsites to their new hosting environment, and they’re now being managed by a small wordpress-specialist company we procured through the g-cloud.
Harry Metcalfe of DXW, one of our new suppliers, wrote about the project on his blog.
There are a number of reasons why we needed to make these changes to the way we operate:
- The managed service contract DH currently has in place will end on 31 March 2013 and the DH corporate website will move to the single government domain GOV.UK on 26 March
- As well as our corporate content we also have about 40 subsites on our wordpress platform, including bulletins and blogs. Of these we only plan to retain our 4 engagement sites for the Secretary of State’s priorities e.g. http://dementiachallenge.dh.gov.uk
- Many of the channels that we currently have in place will stop due to changes to the health and care system and because responsibility for these areas of work will move to the NHS Commissioning Board or Public Health England.
- And of the remaining sites we have, some will migrate to GOV.UK after April, others will migrate to a central government blogging platform, and some will be archived.
So because we’re radically scaling back the number of sites we have, we needed to move to a low-cost and flexible replacement for our hosting and support. We simply want to pay for what we use.
In order to get to where we want to be there are still a few things we need to do more thinking about, including what we want from our digital first publications, how best to run our formal/ informal consultations and how to do better email newsletters and email marketing.
There’s lots to do but it feels like we're getting there.