May 2013
22 posts
1 tag
What happened when we changed the Inside...
[This post is by Ashraf Chohan]
On 9th April we made major changes to the Inside Government navigation bar by 1) exposing the sections rather than nesting them and 2) moving the search query field to the left.
This was in response to user testing that suggested users were having difficulty finding some content, such as consultations which had been in a drop down under publications.
I’ve...
1 tag
Some upgrades to HTML publications
HTML publications are now labelled with their sub-type, so it’s clearer what you’re looking at if you land there from Google/directly
The link text that takes you to the parent publication page on GOV.UK is a bit clearer (it reads “See more information about this publication” instead of repeating the title as the link text)
Consultations now also support HTML...
1 tag
A statement about statements
We were asked this:
Hello,
Re: WMS + commentary
Aware there’s a content type for WMS and GOV.UK search under ‘speeches’ results in a lot of WMS’, however as these are published in PDF form on parliament.uk, are there guidelines on deciding when they should be published on GOV.UK?
Current DH motto is not to publish things twice in public domain. Recent example was the...
2 tags
Killing the name of
We’re planning to drop the name “Inside Government” from the front end of the site in about mid June.
There’s mounting evidence that the label hinders more than it helps. Most users barely notice it, and those who do tend to think it implies “internal to government” rather than “workings of government”.
Mid June feels like the right time to drop...
1 tag
We know where you live
If you’ve published any new content since yesterday late afternoon you will probably have noticed that we are now pre-filling the “lead organisation” field with your organisation. Given that the app already knows where you live, it’s a no brainer that we should infer that the document is led by your org.
It’s just a small thing, but hopefully will speed up your...
1 tag
Working off the grid for the next two weeks
For 2 weeks starting today, we are switching mode to give the team some space to breathe.
It’s been an intense 9 or so months, with prioritisation mostly driven by transition deadlines.
So this past week we’ve been taking a step back, talking as a team about the things we’d most like to prioritise to make our own product better, and have written them up as cards on the window...
2 tags
Please use the support form!
With 24 depts and 31 other orgs now live on the site, it won’t surprise you to hear that we get a lot of support requests, questions and suggestions.
It’s not sustainable to deal with these requests directly by phone and email, especially with the hundreds of ALBs soon to join the site.
From now on, if you call or email us directly about something that the support form is intended to deal with,...
1 tag
Please use multi-lingual publishing features for...
In February we added features that enable you to publish translated editions of documents (how to do this is explained in http://inside-inside-gov.tumblr.com/post/44215691162/worldwide and http://inside-inside-gov.tumblr.com/post/45412650932/ability-to-translate-into-welsh).
Our implementation of multi-lingual publishing provides effective visual cues to users, paths for search engines and...
1 tag
Style and publisher workshops: numbers and lessons
(This post is by Simon Kaplan).
By then end of May over 390 of you - departmental and agency web editors, statisticians and press officers - will have attended 1 of the 16 different GOV.UK style and Publisher workshops held over the last 5 months.
After each workshop, we’ve usually mailed out slide packs and written answers to questions you’ve asked. We’ve also made sure you all have access...
1 tag
Please don't create news stories which only...
We see a surprising amount of this sort of thing, which we guess is down to old habits (imposed by legacy CMS software) dying hard.
This news story https://www.gov.uk/government/news/dbs-news-publication-april merely states the fact that this publication https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/dbs-news-may-2013 has been published, and adds no value. The news story has then been featured on the...
1 tag
Flag your FOI contact today
The changes to FOI information on organisation pages we told you about last week have been live since early this week. But most departments are yet to update their contacts. Please go and do that today.
It only takes a second. Just edit the relevant contact and change its type to “Freedom of Information contact” as shown here:
Here’s the before and after to show what it...
1 tag
Search by slug in the admin interface
In the admin interface, where you can filter documents by title, you can now also enter a slug.
The slug is the bit of the URL after the last slash, eg all of the bold bit in https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/access-to-work-official-statistics-january-2011
A small thing, but a useful one.
1 tag
Bug with document series
There’s a bug right now which prevents you adding documents to a series, unless the series’s summary field has been populated.
We introduced the bug when we added the summary field to series and made it mandatory. Oops, our bad. We’ll ship a fix on Monday.
In the meantime, if you go in and edit the series and add a summary the error will go away.
1 tag
Contacts, contacts, contacts
We’ve been doing a lot to improve the handling of contact data lately Here’s some new information about the stuff we haven’t yet told you about, and a re-cap of what we have.
1. All contact information should now be added as ‘contacts’ under the relevant organisation’s profile.
This is so that:
a) editors can manage the data in one place and insert it...
1 tag
Why don't policies appear as a tag on statistics...
We were asked this:
Hello
Statistics items have a ‘policy’ field in the back-end, but the selected policy does not display in the front.
We think this is a bug, especially as stats items tagged with a policy appear in the ‘latest’ tab of the policy in question.
For example, this item does not appear to have a policy in the front:...
1 tag
Scheduled publishing now works for updated...
The scheduled publishing feature does two things:
1. Publishes the document at the specified time
2. Sets the cache expiry time on all the index pages where the document will appear to the specified time, so that the document appears in relevant places across the site at that time
It works well. Bar a few early hiccups, the scheduled publishing function has been reliably publishing new documents...
1 tag
Featuring without tagging
We made a change recently so that it is now possible to feature any document on an organisation or world location page without it being necessary to tag the document to that org/world location.
We did this because we saw a few examples where it was misleading to show a tag - for example this speech about immigration was tagged to one world location (because they wanted to feature it). We’ve...
1 tag
A clearer FOI journey
We’re working on making the journey easier for users seeking to request information under the Freedom of Information Act.
Here’s a mock up of how FOI information will appear on org pages from later this week:
The 2 FOI links that were previously under the ‘corporate information’ heading (‘How to make an FOI request’ and ‘Our FOI releases’) have...
2 tags
Reporting a technical fault to GDS
The support form has been operational for a while now. We’ve had some feedback, which we’ve acted on as a result.
Here’s a note of a couple of changes made to the internal [government-only] support form, which can be found at https://www.gov.uk/support/internal.
New way to report to technical problems
GOV.UK has extensive monitoring in place, so that for most technical problems...
1 tag
A totally topical taste
Next Wednesday, the Queen’s Speech will set out the government’s legislative agenda for the coming session of the House of Commons.
It’s a high-profile set-piece event which will bring together news items and other publications from a number of departments.
On GOV.UK, we’ll be providing users with a point of entry to all of this content through a new ‘topical event’ landing page.
So this is...
1 tag
1 tag
So what's next?
The site is built. It tests well with users. The departments have all moved in. So what’s next?
In all the government web projects I’ve worked on before, this would be the moment we walk away. The budget and project team would be replaced with business-as-usual support arrangements, usually comprising a much too low number of monthly developer-hours.
Not this time. Digital products...
April 2013
21 posts
1 tag
Mobiles, ministers and the media - feature updates
The end of 5 months of departmental transitions looms but we aren’t slowing down any. In fact, I think the team might be speeding up.
Recent sprints have produced a bumper crop of features. Here’s your 1 minute and 49 seconds update…
More mobile niceness
Featured images were too small to make out on on mobile. Now their size is much more reasonable. And some long text titles...
2 tags
A quick Pivotal tip
We’re in the habit of sharing links to tickets in our public Pivotal Tracker project to let people see how we’ve translated their request into a user story, and so they can track where it is in the backlog.
Pivotal’s interface is not exactly intuitive, so here’s a quick tip on how to see where the story is in the queue.
When you click the link to a ticket, you’ll...
2 tags
A change to the 'relevant to local gov' checkbox
You no longer need to check a box on documents to specify whether they are relevant to local government (contrary to what we said in previous posts).
This relevance is now being inferred from the association to policies. All you need do is tag your news, speeches, publications and consultations to the relevant policy and the rest will follow automatically.
The only place that checkbox now...
1 tag
...And a side order of social media policy
Organisations can now add a corporate information page to explain their approach to using social media. This is so, for example, they can link from their Twitter bio to a page explaining how they will and won’t engage. Some clever young civil servant once suggested this was a good idea.
Here’s the admin interface:
The resulting link shows up in the small print at the bottom of...
1 tag
All the social media icons you can eat...
For the first five months of Inside Gov’s young life, organisations have only been able to feature 5 links to the social web in the “follow us” section of their respective homepages.
They were able to link to one account each on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Flickr, with a 5th slot for linking out to a blog.
Here’s one FCO made earlier:
That’s all changed,...
1 tag
Removing content - back to draft or to the eternal...
Liz Hitchcock in the Inside Government content team has asked us to update you on the process for removing content from the frontend…
To have content unpublished or deleted send your request via https://www.gov.uk/support/internal.
When you submit a request, please specify whether you are requesting something is unpublished or deleted:
Unpublishing reverts the document to draft state,...
1 tag
Embedding contact information (like press office...
This afternoon we will ship a new feature to enable publishers to inject contact information into any page using a simple markdown command.
You should use this feature instead of adding the contact info as text on the page, so that contacts are re-usable across the site and (later) downloadable as vCard format and available to third parties through the API.
Here’s how it will...
1 tag
No format for that? Talk to us!
All too often, we’re seeing examples of publishers in departments hijacking content formats to publish material that it would be better to model explicitly as a thing in its own right.
Here are a few of examples where it would have been great if the publishers had flagged to us that there wasn’t a suitable format or functionality, rather than shoe-horning it into a format designed to...
1 tag
Short URLs for organisations' profile pages
Any organisations moving to GOV.UK which previously had a corporate website at their own domain will get a short URL (or ‘vanity URL’) at the root of GOV.UK which they can use to promote their new home on the web.
These take the form of the organisation’s initials, for organisations that refer to themselves in that way, for example www.gov.uk/dft and www.gov.uk/defra, or the...
1 tag
Please don't write "statistical press release" in...
Some publishers are titling their press releases about newly published statistics with the phrase “Statistical press release” or similar phrases.
Here’s one from this morning:
And here’s a load more
As we’ve said on this blog before, duplicating format labels in title fields is bad form and results in this kind of thing appearing in email alerts and feed...
1 tag
Iterating HTML publications
Here are a few small changes we’ve made to the HTML publications format since it was first added:
we’re now using Transport rather than Helvetica as the typeface, and have applied standard GOV.UK gutters and page dimensions
headings are now bold
we’ve improved the alignment of the header area
we fixed a bug which was requiring HTML pubs to be published twice before they would...
1 tag
Details, details
Here’s a ist of smaller changes we’ve introduced recently that you may want to be aware of:
If a user selects a document from the filtered lists of announcements, policies or publications then clicks the browser’s back button, the user’s filter settings are now remembered.
We’ve introduced a new sub-type of organisation called “Executive office”. This...
1 tag
New navigation is imminent
The new navigation which Mark blogged about recently is being rolled out imminently. We’ve got enough evidence from user testing to feel confident that it will improve usability.
Here’s the prototype if you want to check it out in advance.
(If this link gives you an error, try deleting the trailing slash)
1 tag
The Get Involved page is live
Version one of the ‘get involved’ page is now live.
Go and take a look at it here.
We’ve written a fair bit about this before so I’ll just let the page speak for itself.
You can get to it from the middle of the how gov works page, and we will be promoting it from the main nav soon.
1 tag
Coming soon: the GOV.UK blogging platform
Here’s a preview of the minimal viable product for blogs on GOV.UK, which will be landing in around late April. (Note: These are just mock-ups. Usual caveats apply.)
A blog homepage, with optional featured post
A single blog post
Like the rest of GOV.UK, the design of the blogs will be responsive, so they scale to work well on all devices.
Like the rest of GOV.UK, the design and...
lasvegas01 asked: Our department blocks tumble posts so the only way I can make sure my team knows what is there is to access via the app on my iPhone and then retype it into word to circulate around my team. Is there any way the posts can be put up in such a way that I can copy and paste from the app to an email doing away with the need to retype? So much easier on my fingers
Anonymous asked: Elizabeth at HPA/PHE here: Why is there *no* accommodation of italics in the GDS markdown? We're referring to names of pathogens in the Green Book series: binomial nomenclature includes italics. Please see Oxford Dictionary for Scientific writers and editors under 'binomial nomenclature'. I would put the book title in italics, except GDS does not use them.
Anonymous asked: With the weekly updates to the style guide, can you please add a meaningful table of contents, rather than '4-11 inside government content types'? I'm finding it difficult to use without some headers to navigate with. I realise that jump links and anchors are SOOOO last century, but your guide is now long enough to require some more navigation support. Regards, Elizabeth Brown HPA
Anonymous asked: How does the UK government go about sharing information it generates with niche audiences of stakeholders or partners to facilitate the advancement of certain policies if it no longer posts the information on the website?
1 tag
New features feature
Admin for Worldwide locations and organisations has been tidied up and is looking better than ever.
Which is cool but not as cool as the fact that you can now feature translations independently of their English equivalent on location landing pages.
This means that on occasions when what is most important for an overseas office to communicate to English speaking users is different to users...
3 tags
Last week saw highest no. of visits to #govuk 9.18million. Why? New Inside Gov content from DH, FCO, DFID + HO gov.uk/performance/da…
— GDS (@gdsteam) April 3, 2013
March 2013
19 posts
1 tag
HTML publications are go!
We told you not to use HTML publications until they were a bit more developed.
They are now a bit more developed.
The format is still at the alpha stage but there is enough functionality built and working for you to start using it now.
Here’s an example from DH, who made the very first use of the format on their launch day on Tuesday:
What are they?
HTML versions of...
1 tag
New features courtesy of DH and DFID
Today DFID and DH joined Inside Government. Huge congratulations and thanks to everyone in those departments who made today’s move possible.
There were a few new features that we brought forward to coincide with these two departments’ transition, including:
Support for attachments on news articles. These can be used to attach media packs, audi transcripts and similar files that...
1 tag
“Sometimes it is not high-tech solutions that are needed but the simple act of...”
– http://www.standard.co.uk/goingout/exhibitions/designs-of-the-year-2013-design-museum—exhibition-review-8540026.html
2 tags
Local info for info4local people
As mentioned a while back, the info4local email service is closing over Easter, and all existing subscribers will be migrated to GOV.UK.
(In case you don’t know, info4local is a service that sends email alerts to thousands of local government employees about stuff central government is publishing of relevance to them. It’s pretty popular and many local authority staff rely on it to be...
1 tag
New corporate info page for emergency staff...
Several departments’ former websites included a hidden web page to update staff in case of emergencies or problems accessing their office buildings.
We’ve now catered for this on Inside Government.
Any organisation can, if they wish, create a new ‘corporate information page’ called ‘staff news and information’, like so (see the option at the bottom of the...
1 tag
Editing documents you've scheduled for publication
We received some questions about the scheduled publishing feature, the answers to which are worth sharing with all admin users.
The scheduled publishing feature allows you to specify when a document will appear on the live site.
Remember that if you set a ‘scheduled for publication’ date, you must submit the article and it must also be reviewed and published by an editor. Otherwise it won’t...
1 tag
Access and opening hours for Worldwide offices
The UK government has hundreds of overseas ‘posts’. An organisation may have a number of offices spread across a country or even many offices within a single complex. Some of these may be in straightforward urban areas, while others can be way out ‘in the field’.
Unique and ubiquitous
In each case, the office will have a set of instructions for people wishing to contact...
