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Seven areas to look at to answer the question: how well does our website do its job, and what improvements do we need to make?

Public Strategist is on a nostalgia trip this afternoon: Four scenarios for government in 2011. As seen by me in 2001. I will leave others to judge where we have got to. http://yfrog.com/gyr09omj — Stefan Czerniawski (@pubstrat) February 18, 2011 He’s dug out a nice chart from a decade ago, outlining four potential future scenarios…

24 Dec: in the rush to build apps for everything, it’s easy to lose sight of the easier, simpler and cheaper approach to making your content accessible to mobile users: a mobile version of your site. Huh – isn’t that an app? Not necessarily: with a bit of inspiration and tweaking of your templates, you…

23 Dec: if you’re in the business of mocking up sites or designs for other people to comment on, you’ll have encountered the challenge of making a layout look realistic without having much content to play with. The conventional approach is to use ‘Lorem Ipsum’ or a special chunk of faux-Latin text designed to show…

20 Dec: the biggest challenge in a web project is getting everyone’s expectations in roughly the same place. The big boss thinks it will engage thousands (but is actually happy with it looking shiny), the (internal) client says it needs to have functions X, Y and Z (but actually doesn’t mind, as long as it…

4 Dec: Need to discuss website layout tweaks or pet hates with someone you don’t sit next to? Here’s a nice, no-nonsense little app: MarkUp MarkUp gives you a little bookmarklet to drag your browser bar which, when clicked, opens up a little toolbar on whatever site you happen to be on. You can draw…

Six weeks ago, Dave Briggs kicked off a little project which he described as follows: I’m rather interested in the referendum that we are going get get next May in the UK about changing our voting system. It occurs to me that it isn’t an issue I have a particularly strong understanding of, and I’m…

Cast your mind back if you will to chilly February, amid the growing crescendo/death spiral of pre-election communications. Neil and his team were finishing off the new corporate website, having shunned friends and family for weekends on end. A member of the senior management team came bounding back from a cross government meeting where they…

Just a quick one to flag for readers who get my stuff by RSS that I’ve got a parallel tumblog alongside this main blog, which I use to post up quick reviews of tools that I like for web work. I’ve called it A Load Of Cobblers, to celebrate the spirit and practice of cobbled-together…

Recently, I’ve been grappling with the issue of what a corporate homepage should do. Obviously, a lot of what I do is central government-oriented but in this case I’ve been casting the net quite wide, as the interface design problems of corporate organisations in whatever sector are actually pretty similar. A corporate homepage generally isn’t…