Holding the fort: developing a new Civilservice.gov.uk
On Friday 30th September we re-launched the website for the UK Civil Service. This site is the primary means of communicating what the constitutional role of the UK Civil Service is, what it does and the codes it is bound by.
The Civil Service:
- serves the Government of the day,
- does not automatically change when the Government does
- and is bound in all it’s dealings by the values of integrity, honesty, objectivity and impartiality as laid out by the Civil Service code
The Civil Service has around 450,000 people working in roles all over the country, ranging from the Government Veterinary surgeons, Ministers Private Office’s or administering welfare benefits, all of whom need access to a wide range of information about their pension, job opportunities or professional networks. In addition the site provides information on the role of different organisations and bodies and their performance to ensure the Civil Service remains accountable and transparent.
Managing a site covering all of these needs is no small task. So the coincidence of impending changes to Civil Service recruitment processes and the end of the existing hosting contract for the site provided us an opportunity to revisit the site’s content, design and function. We needed to make sure that it is providing a stable, value for money interim option until it can be encompassed into the ongoing Single Government Domain project.
The old Civil Service site was run by the Cabinet Office digital communications team, using a customised off-the-shelf content management system that worked well when initially applied in 2008 but became increasingly dated and inflexible over time. In addition there were considerable hosting costs from a traditional fixed term contract. As a result we were keen to ensure that the revised site would be in line with both our commitment to open-source and flexible, scalable hosting.
We (the Digital Engagement team) were tasked with producing a new site at very little cost and within a six week window. To restructure the content to make it easier to find we used Google analytics to analyse typical user journeys. Harnessing user insight will be an iterative process through the ongoing development of this site.
We chose to use WordPress as it offers a simple, quick (with such a short development window) and flexible open source solution to a site primarily designed for publishing content. As such it is easy to use for a wide range of content editors and, of course, provides significant cost savings for maintenance and development. Rather than develop a theme ourselves we chose to use a theme called ‘striking’ developed by Kaptinlin that fitted what we needed with a little customisation.
Using WordPress also means we can tap into the plug-ins that the large WordPress developer community creates to solve problems that would have caused major work. For example using a WP plug-in to amend some of the 30,000+ links that were migrated saved time and stress when faced with a tight deadline. We needed to compress the initial 500 page offering with 2649 media files, the vast majority being.pdf documents, to 320 by using the theme’s tabbing function on pages.
As I mentioned above one of the drivers for the re-launch was changes to the CS recruitment process. All job adverts for the UK Civil Service have moved to a new portal on the site commissioned by the MOD and now led by HMRC. This portal offers an end to end recruitment system that gives users the option to complete application forms online and facilitates Departments sifting and contact with applicants (from interview requests to letters of acceptance). This marks a considerable improvement in user experience on the old system which required the user to download MS Word files to access the application form and vacancy information and return them via email or fax.
The next phase of development for the Civil Service site will be to create a platform for professions to share information and collaborate in a way that uses the secure collaboration tools of the CivilMedia Suite. We are also busy making sure the site complies completely with Government web guidelines (we ran out of time to do this before launch and didn’t want to spend a lot of money to extend the contract just to accommodate this).
Whilst the new site ticks a lot of the boxes (not least in that we will save over £60k per annum on hosting and running the site), we’re aware it doesn’t tick all of them now but we know that we have to launch and improve as we go on –following the same agile principles as the Single Domain project even though we have chosen a quite different solution to a different project.
Cool. Glad to see that WordPress is getting more use in Gov. Still not convinced about custom dev of your Single Domain framework… do you have a requirements spec for that published anywhere? Cheers, Jon.
There isn’t a published requirements spec, as we’ve not mapped out requirements that way for the single domain. We’re taking an agile approach, driven by the needs as described in Richard’s post a few weeks back http://digital.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/2011/09/19/introducing-the-needotron-working-out-the-shape-of-the-product/ – the technical requirements are to balance that with appropriately high levels of uptime, stability and security.
Interesting but i think u are missing a trick. your need-o-tron should be customer facing. how do you know that the needs that you think are important internally really matter to us, the great unwashed?
u need something like basecamp answers http://answers.37signals.com/basecamp where actual customers make feature requests. voting on feature request by other users enable you to prioritise requirements properly based on real customer insight… (im sure you’re aware of this kind of thing already…)
I’m concerned that your dev is slightly inward looking at present?
love the agile approach though – big thumbs up for that. also love how you take time to respond to my comments.
cheers
jon
Will you be sharing the theme that has been developed for this WordPress site?
Lux – Due to time constraints we did not develop a theme in-house. We purchased the “Striking” theme and then modified it ever so slightly to fit our needs. If you are interested in using the theme then it is available through its developer, Kaptinlin.
Are you advertising jobs to work on GDS on the Civil Service website?
All Civil Service jobs are advertised on the CS Jobs portal here: https://jobsstatic.civilservice.gov.uk/csjobs.html
Hope this helps,
James Taylor
GDS
Thanks. Are any/all GDS jobs advertised there as I’m not sure they’re actually classed as civil service jobs. Are they advertised elsewhere, or do you use particular agencies? I frequently check[ed] the old and new job portals and haven’t seen anything.
Hi Louise,
Apologies for the delay.
Currently there aren’t any job adverts on the Civil Service jobs portal for the Government Digital Service but we are in the middle of a re-organization so do keep your eye out for adverts.
All roles in the GDS have to be filled in line with the Recruitment Principles published by the Civil Service Commission.
The Commission excepts certain appointments from the principle of appointment on merit through fair and open competition where it believes this is justified by the needs of the Civil Service. In the case of the GDS, some roles have been considered to be exempt under the following condition.
See Annex C of the Recruitment Principles:
Hope this helps,
James
Thanks James.
Great start to using open source. Interested to know whether you implemented basic wordpress security on the site such as renaming the database prefix, not installing in the root directory and locking down the number of login attempts? Surely the government web guidelines state you have to do this else the domain is vulnerable to attack? On the other hand you could be using something like vaultpress to monitor the security of the installation?