The Last Two Weeks

Posted on 21 December 2012 by Patrick Jones

So, back to full strength (Russ returned last week) and we’re also now benefiting from the new addition of Lore into our team. Luckily Lore already has a good knowledge of using our CMS so has had an immediate positive impact by helping us to deal quickly with content publishing requests across both our corporate sites.

Russ has obviously been busy catching up on the progress of various projects as well as emails and tweets whilst for the rest of us it’s been business as usual…

Social Media

• With the return of freezing temperatures we’ve been doing a bit more work on our live winter transport information service http://www.devon.gov.uk/transportinfo (click on the snowman!). This service works in conjunction with our @DevonRoads twitter feed, which we know needs a bit of a review
• Began a pilot of 2 new social media dashboards www.protopage.com/devonnewscentre and www.protopage.com/devonroads
• More DCC Heads of Service social media roadshows.

Web and Digital Design and Development

• Continued work on creating the DCC staff news centre and new staff intranet homepage

• Completed work on the new DCC Annual Review website which has been created by re-using our Strategic Plan template which has also now been migrated into a responsive framework
• Using the same template we also created a new site for the Engaging Devon Strategy.
• We’ve transferred the DCC Libraries blog from WordPress.com to http://beta.devon.gov.uk/libraries/blog/
• Began work on the templates for the planned new Adult and Community Learning website
• Reskinned the Devon Audit Partnership site and now awaiting a go live date – currently no visible link I’m afraid!

Content Design and Publishing

• More work on the layout of the new Social Care & Health webpages
• Have Your Say (new ‘Conversation Centre’ project) functionality & design discussions
• Published initial content on consultation regarding school admission arrangements for 2014-15
• Updated out Records Disclosure Service webpages to reflect the merger of Criminal Records Bureau (CRB) & the Independent Safeguarding Authority (ISA) to become the Disclosure & Barring Service (DBS)

• Completed some updating and amending of our ‘Winter weather’ web content. We’ve renamed our main page as Severe weather and now include more prominent links to our flooding info and have tried to strip out any duplication of content or links to hopefully make it all a bit tidier and easy to use.
• We updated some content about the DCC Transportation Planning team in order that they can use this page to supplement an advert for new posts

General Stuff

• Video editing support for colleagues in Comms service
• Re-assigning of Vuelio (our press management system) accounts to tie in with new starters and leavers
• Looked into more commenting systems and the possibility of opening them up for testing by external users
• Began looking into Google graphs API for presentation of stats as well as thinking about a Google stats/Govmetric stats dashboard prototype
• Business process mapping – looking at the ideal working processes for the Communications service
• Demonstrated our news centre to staff from Devon & Cornwall Police
• Attended a LocalGov Digital meeting at the LGA in London.
• Discovered this great demo of what can be done using just CSS http://thegoodman.cc/ (watch using Chrome)

The Lighter Side

• Santa: the brand guide
• A nice animation narrated by some classic Carl Sagan – Pale Blue Dot
• I won the Communications Team Christmas bowling competition and the webteam won the best team…not that we are gloating but it was nice to win

Patrick Jones

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