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Posts by Carl Haggerty

About Carl Haggerty

All things digital - content, strategy, communications, innovation, engagement, participation, data and people

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Error 403 – Lessons Learned from Hosting the Elections

Posted on 10 May 2013 by

On Friday last week our new Democracy webpages were put to the test with the Local Election results being broadcast and reported live.

Unfortunately we experienced some downtime during the morning which clearly isn’t and wasn’t a good thing.

We want to share some of the lessons we learned based on a team conversation this morning.

Firstly lets focus on some of the positives, which are actually contributing factors to why it went down, but are worth celebrating at the same time.

The stats for Friday:

  • 42,668 visits
  • 255,281 page views
  • Elections Live Widget – 4,633 visits
  • Average time spent on site – 5 minutes 45 seconds
  • 6,066 visits from Mobile

For comparison our main corporate website stats for Friday were:

  • 19,884
  • 48,938 Page views

These stats are fantastic, but we didn’t anticipate this level of usage given that on an average day the main council website gets around 13,000 visits – so we had planned that we would “worst case” get twice this amount during the day which would have been great….However the critical factor for us, which is why the site went down was that the majority of the 42,000 visits (nearly 4 times the daily average) to the Election pages were during a 2 hour period starting from 10am.… Read the rest

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Create / Innovate

Posted on 25 March 2013 by

June is now the month of Create / Innovate here in Devon.

What is Create / Innovate I hear you ask, well Create / Innovate aims to raise awareness and practical exposure of innovation and service design in public services. It is also intended to challenge and shift the thinking and culture within the organisation and beyond.

One of the reasons for holding Create / Innovate is to respond to a recent report to our Corporate Leadership Team in relation to Barriers to Digital Innovation. The key findings of that report were that we had a diverse set of reasons why digital innovation specifically was difficult – for most services it was a combination of one or more of the following:

  • Attitude to Risk
  • Cultural issues
  • Policy issues
  • Technical issues
  • Resource issues

We had a series of actions which aim to remove or reduce the barriers over the coming months and this has now framed our work programme, the focus of which will include education, awareness and training as well as the practical encouragement and support of pilots and prototypes across the council.… Read the rest

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Procurement Opportunity – Corporate Communications Agency Framework

Posted on 13 March 2013 by

Updated:

Yesterday I tweeted a link to a procurement opportunity which I have to apologise for as it was the wrong link…It was the previous framework details….

The council has gone out to tender with a revised Communications Framework. We’ve had this running for a few years now but this update now includes web design and development and mobile app development. The downside to this is that we have not been able to ascertain previous spending in this areas so it is not possible these lots will be worth over the period of time. However I think it is safe to say that we will need to be open by default and digital by design and we have a very large complex website site which needs sorting out.… Read the rest

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A redesign of our intranet homepage

Posted on 12 February 2013 by

Earlier this year at the start of January we launched an updated design for our intranet homepage and also launched an internal staff newscentre.

This project was really the tip of a huge iceberg as we have only redesigned the homepage and top level navigation to make it easier for people to access the content they need.

We will – over a period of time – be working with colleagues from across the council on reviewing/deleting/updating the content and getting a greater level of ownership around content.

However we have yet to make a final decision about what platform(s) we are using for intranet and what we want our intranet to be…this is the topic of much discussion but whilst these are ongoing we wanted to make some short term quick wins.… Read the rest

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Changing Re:WorkDigital

Posted on 13 November 2012 by

It is often the case that when you start helping others improve things you can often neglect your own stuff.

When we started this site we literally created it before we had pushed forward our standards on responsiveness and implemented the bootstrap multi-site, but our intention was to always move our site into that so we can lead by example.

Well we have finally got around to migrating our site into a new responsive theme and in the process we have created a base template for service blogs which we can deploy quickly from now on…one example being the wordpress.com hosted http://devonlibraries.wordpress.com.… Read the rest

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Open Data Network for the South West

Posted on 24 October 2012 by

Part of the councils Content Strategy and our work on Open Data is to support and promote greater transparency. The aims of which are to free our data and decouple the layers of our existing web architecture. Continue reading →

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Behind the content strategy – Open by Default – Digital by Design

Posted on 17 October 2012 by

It is all well and good having really catchy principles or vision statements but the challenge is helping people understand what you mean – so what do we mean by Open by Default – Digital by Design. Continue reading →

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Reflections from Dubai and the #GSMS event

Posted on 24 September 2012 by

A couple of weeks ago I received a very welcome but random message from Dan Slee, it basically said “Do you fancy an all expenses paid trip to Dubai” – “PS this isn’t a spam message” or something along those lines.

My response was obviously Yes, although it nearly didn’t happen as I’d already planned to attend a weekend in Cornwall with some friends. After some last minute flight changes, I was set to fly on Tuesday morning….

The GCC Government Social Media Summit

The event was the GCC (Gulf Cooperation Council) Social Media Summit, held at the very nice Ritz-Carlton Hotel and I was speaking on Day 3 following the topics that Dan had previously set but with a Devon Spin of course…

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Going beyond basic web analytics

Posted on 2 August 2012 by

Using web-based analytics is essentially about looking at how your website is being used. It gives you a feel for how many visits your site gets over a given time period, how many of these visits are unique, what the most popular pages are, as well as a whole range of other information. In order to measure and evaluate our content effectively we need to adopt a blended approach which uses traditional web analytics along with additional sources of information/data Continue reading →

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Why reinvent the wheel

Posted on 26 July 2012 by

As we progress on our content strategy journey, we have started to look at the principles and standards that guide us as we move forward. Continue reading →

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