GDS has been able to put blogging at the forefront of government’s engagement with the public
When government department and agency websites moved to GOV.UK, the Government Digital Service (GDS) spotted the opportunity to facilitate and centralise blogging. They wanted to launch a single blog platform specifically for central government, and asked dxw to help make it happen
Outcome
dxw created blog.gov.uk back in 2013 and we have been hosting and developing it for GDS ever since.
With a safe and easy-to-use service in place, GDS has been able to put open working via blogging firmly at the forefront of central government’s engagement with the public.
“Always on the ball, amazingly positive and professional, fast-paced, highly-skilled and wholeheartedly user-focused – dxw play an essential role in supporting our business.“
Service Owner, Government Digital Service
What we did
Since its launch, we’ve managed the hosting and infrastructure that blog.gov.uk runs on. And we’ve continued to improve and develop the service based on user feedback and research.
For the administrators across government, the platform is clear and simple to use and streamlines the content management process. Its design centres the needs of users and is fully accessible.
Doing further discovery work with the GDS editorial team
Following its release we’ve done additional discovery work to find out how we can further iterate the platform.
We ran a roadmapping workshop, for example, revisiting questions like “who are our users?” and pinning down what more we need to learn or prove. Reaching a common understanding of GDS’s goals, gives us clear priorities to work on.
One of the top ongoing priorities is, of course, security. We’re strong advocates for regular penetration testing and conduct regular security audits on the site to detect and fix any vulnerabilities.
Developing tools to make the service more secure
blog.gov.uk is a WordPress multisite with more than 2,000 publishers (at the time of writing). Having found many inactive accounts, we built auditing tools to make it easier for the GDS team to manage the platform.
We also developed some simple tools to ‘deactivate’ users and automatically make users ‘inactive’ after they haven’t logged in for a period of time.
Understanding the needs of government bloggers
Between development sprints, we have carried out user research including interviews with blog owners and authors to understand their needs and experience of the service.
While the blogging platform usually works well, we’ve found other challenges for blog owners – mainly around processes, knowing where to go for help and getting approval from internal teams to publish blog posts.
We produce backlogs of user needs and prioritise these with GDS.
What’s next
We hope the Government’s blogging platform will keep evolving as an important enabler of the open working that has a critical role in restoring trust in the State.