I really like the thinking behind the corporate publishing bit of the single gov.uk domain. I like the simplicity of what the departments participating in the beta have been asked to do so far: to describe what the Government's objectives …
I'm quite pleased with this: Health conversations. It's a simple thing - a different way of presenting content that already appears somewhere else on dh.gov.uk. We're using it as the DH version of a blogs homepage. We're pulling content from a few different sources - …
If you were going to write a history of UK government digital engagement, you could do worse than start with the story of the Foreign Office blogs. I'm biased, but I think blogging at the Foreign Office has been a …
I joined the Department of Health in August last year. I still sometimes feel like the new boy, but I've been here long enough for people to expect to see results. So how are we doing? When I joined, I …
Warning: This is a blog about filing and productivity. It makes the case that social tools like Yammer help people to be less busy and more productive. I took a day off a few weeks ago. When I returned to …
At some point in just about every presentation I give about digital communication, and our efforts to do it better at the Department of Health, I get asked a version of this question: "That's all very well, but what about all the …
Smartphones changed the way I use the internet. My previous online behaviour seems almost quaint now. Online maps, for example, were already pretty useful before I could access them on my phone. But a map on my phone - that …
If all goes to plan this weekend, the corporate bits of the DH web presence will be simpler and a bit easier to use on Monday morning. I've mentioned before what's driving this work, and some of the things that …
We're about to simplify the content we provide via the Department of Health corporate website. The website won't look that different once we've done it. But we will have made some pretty big changes to the way we generate and …
A long time ago I hand-coded a content management system from scratch using PHP and MySQL for a cheese reviews website. It wasn't a very good CMS, and it was a rubbish website. But I did it - it was …