Postbureaucrat

Personal blogging by Steph Gray, former digital agency founder and erstwhile bureaucrat

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A better website brief

July 16, 2015

As someone who runs an agency offering WordPress website development, I get quite a lot of website development briefs in my inbox. Some are excellent: they give me and the team a clear sense of what’s required. Typically, they’re documents under 20 pages long which talk quite a lot about users and goals and priorities, about what’s…

Doing the right thing right

May 29, 2014

Our office partners, Claremont, have a new motto: Do the right thing right. It’s annoying, because it’s probably what I’d choose if I were choosing a motto for what we do. More than kudos, more than money, more than publicity, the sense of craft in building a really good website or delivering some really useful training for…

Opening up

May 14, 2013

Twenty years ago, before regular people had the web, I was a 13 year old discovering a hybrid database/scripting application called HyperCard. One of my early projects was a random number generator for the newly-launched National Lottery, which incredibly, made it onto the cover floppy disk (‘3MB of great software!’) one of the early editions…

Introducing CommentariatGOVUK

December 21, 2012

It’s almost Christmas, we skipped the 24tips this year, so I thought I’d release a cheeky little mince pie of a WordPress theme in case others find it useful. Today’s seen the launch of the latest little site on our Read+Comment platform, designed for fast-turnaround, flexible publishing of documents for comment. DCLG wanted a site…

Engagement on a shoestring

July 27, 2012

You could probably do more digital engagement around a series of stakeholder seminars, but it would be a tall order. For the last month or so, DCMS have been running a little site we helped build for them on our Read+Comment platform, to open up discussion around a series of seminars they’re running to inform the…

Making WordPress accessible to AAA

November 24, 2011

At Simon’s recent WordUp Whitehall event, I presented on the process I went through on a project with BIS/DCMS to create a discussion platform for the eAccessibility Forum. The site went live yesterday, thanks to the sterling efforts of the DCMS Digital Comms team and their WordPress-smart IT colleagues – with a press release from…

Whitehall in WordPress

November 7, 2011

The clue was in the 150pt slide Simon put up at the start of the day, but actually I think he was just catalysing a conclusion most of the participants in Whitehall’s second WordUp event came to independently: we’re on the verge of a new era of Sharing. 12 months ago, only Number 10 and Defra…

A very British election

October 11, 2011

Just a quick post to flag a little site launched last month for a modest and little-known public figure, reported to be the first Briton to give £1bn to charitable causes, and the third longest-serving minister of the New Labour years. Lord Sainsbury of Turville was nominated earlier this year to succeed Prince Phillip as…

A new website for Involve

March 28, 2011

One of the nice things about my new life is that I get to work with and for people from outside government, as well as those inside. Our latest non-gov project went live late last week, replacing the website for public engagement experts Involve with something cleaner, neater and more flexible. Simon, Involve’s director, had…