In our last update we talked about some of the new responsibilities we’ve inherited and what our plans were for the next few months. We wanted to give you all an update on what we’ve been up to since then and what we’ve still to do.
Consumer Focus Corporate Website
In October we announced that we had taken over responsibility for the Consumer Focus corporate website. One of our first jobs was to transfer the site from the ASP.NET content management system provided by the original developers to WordPress. This involved converting the existing design to WordPress templates, bringing over all the content and training the staff involved in updating the site. With everything completed we launched the “new” site in late November.
Since then we’ve been working on the second phase of work – a complete content restructure and update to make content easier to find across Consumer Focus’ target audiences. This, together with several tweaks to the look and feel of the site (designed to take advantage of some of the features available in WordPress), will be completed in the next few weeks.
Both phases have been a huge undertaking, but we felt it was important to make it as easy as possible to make changes in the future, hence the switch to WordPress. One of the advantages of the WordPress platform is that it is so easy to extend. Where we need to add in new functionality, it is likely a plugin already exists to do the job. If it doesn’t, creating one is fairly straightforward.
For those that are interested in some of the technical aspects- the site now uses WordPress MU on a LAMP platform. We control all the code through our SVN repositories and deploy to the servers using Capistrano. This is almost identical to the way in which we manage our other projects such as this site and Recalled Products.
Guidelines for public sector websites
As some of you may be aware, the Central Office of Information (COI) publishes a set of guidelines for UK public sector websites. We’ve spent a fair amount of time working out what we need to do to reach compliance and we’ll be making the necessary adaptations to all Consumer Focus and Labs websites over the coming months.
Does Directgov Deliver?
In December we launched ‘Does Directgov Deliver?‘, Consumer Focus’s first report to allow comments directly from members of the public by way of consultative website. The report itself was produced by the Public & Community Services Team within Consumer Focus and looks at whether Directgov delivers on its promise to ‘provide information and online services for the public all in one place’. We wanted to make it easy to comment on each part of the report, so WordPress was the obvious choice. We adapted the Commentariat theme developed by the BIS innovation team to power the website.
If you want to comment on the report, head over to the website. Comments will be closing soon but the website will remain online. Sign up to the mailing list on the website (powered by Google Groups) to be kept up-to-date on Consumer Focus’s work on Directgov.
We are now looking at how we can improve the process of collecting comments on our reports, so keep an eye out for future experiments like this.
Recalled Products
As you may have noticed, in December we turned on another set of features on the Recalled Products website. We now pull in photos and related documents for products when they are available. We’re also experimenting with producing some statistics on the number of recalls we import every week, what categories they are in and what the dangers are. Let us know what you think of these and how we can improve them.
