Newsroom: the backstory

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 had been shown this, and, in a nutshell, they wanted one too.

The brief was helpfully loose: make it easier for the media to access the information they needed via simple link in the bottom of a press notice, without generating a load of extra work for Press Officers. From the Digital team’s perspective, we wanted to increase visibility of our YouTube and Flickr content for media, ensuring that these channels get promoted in every news release. Oh, and the kicker: make something technology independent, that could survive the imminent move from WordPress to SiteCore, without incurring external costs. So we set out to develop something based largely in client-side technologies (i.e. Javascript and CSS) which usefully aggregated corporate announcements, multimedia output and press office contacts for mainstream media and bloggers in a single place – frankly, more of a technical and design challenge than a strategic one, but a fun one nonetheless.

There were half a dozen or so information sources to play with*:

• Press Releases, ministerial speeches (RSS feed)
• Tweets from corporate accounts (RSS feeds)
• Videos on YouTube (RSS feed with multimedia enclosures)
• Flickr photos (API)
• Podcasts on SoundCloud (added by the team later, again, RSS feed)
• Contact details for Press Officers & key facts on policies (static text)
• Email alerts for media to sign up to via GovDelivery

*We also had a plan to add a couple of extras which were built but not yet used. Case studies published elsewhere online were to be tagged using a corporate Delicious account and imported into the newsroom using the RSS feed for the tag. Urgent statements or rebuttals put out by a Press Officer out of hours sometimes aren’t issued as Press Notices in the normal way, so we set up a private Tumblr site to which these could be emailed, which could be embedded or imported into the Newsroom, again via RSS.

The primary tool in our arsenal was the wonderous Feed2JS, which takes an RSS feed and gives you a snippet of Javascript to embed which will render it for you in HTML. It’s free and awesome (and you can even self-host it if you want). This little tool helps single-handedly render the majority of the Newsroom content, the code snippet tweaked slightly to ensure the <noscript> alternative ensures the site degrades fairly gracefully for non-Javascript enabled browsers.

I also developed a couple of code snippets to render the content of a Flickr account or set as an RSS, HTML or Javascript snippet, and likewise with YouTube – feel free to grab the code from those links if that kind of thing is of use to you.

• Version 0.1 (click the image to enlarge) was a good proof of concept, built in an empty page template on our old WordPress site. But there was too much to take in for a notoriously lazy audience.
• Version 0.2 was an improvement, splitting the content into more manageable chunks with a natty Apple-style navigation bar and some concertina sections done in Javascript – but it still felt hard to differentiate the content types on the page
• Version 0.3 was almost there, introducing some nice little icons for the different content types, using CSS to help visually distinguish the lists, and losing the unnecessary mission statement with some DOM-rewriting to save valuable pixels for this audience. And then we moved to SiteCore and purdah struck, so…
• …Version 1.0, which you can now see in all its glory transferred the code into a new CMS and migrated across a stylesheet. The team added SoundCloud podcasts using its RSS feed, in the same way as the other media types.

Early feedback on the prototype from journalists was positive, the Press Office got a nice-looking tool which required literally zero additional work beyond emailing over their contact list, and Neil got one of his much-loved quick wins – and within SiteCore too. Props for this one to Rhys and Ian in the BIS Digital Communications team.

Photo credit: Victoria Peckham

A Load of Cobblers: my tumblog on the favourite tools I use

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 webbery, made from many individual pieces.

I’ve just posted a few new bits and pieces on there:

• Feed2JS: a simple Javascript-based way to show an RSS feed on a site
• Page Saver: a Firefox plugin to take a screenshot of the whole page, not just the visible portion
• 7 favourite digital engagement tools: from my presentation at ConnectedGeneration back in September

There’s also stuff about the email newsletter software Campaign Monitor, Flash video players and how to get a feed of comments on your Flickr photos.

Coming up in the near future are likely to be snippets on Google Analytics’ API and the GAPI PHP library, the uptime service Pingdom, and Flickr open-source-licensed search tool, Compfight.

Corporate homepage design: who’s doing it right?

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 trying to sell, but it might be trying to signpost customers quickly to an e-commerce microsite or customer portal. It’s not aimed at a nice, neat target audience, because it’s got to work for journalists, students, staff, investors and a whole bunch of other people. It’s promoting a wide portfolio of products or services, trying to illustrate it with imagery which is engaging but also generic. And corporate homepages by definition have a large number of people within the organisation clamouring for space and priority.

Some focus on identifying and signposting different audiences, some try and help people accomplish their goal and some just aim to tell compelling human-scale stories about megalithic organisations.

So I’m starting a collection of good corporate homepages, using the Bookmarklist open source tool that powers Digitalgovuk. In a nutshell:

1. Find an intelligent, elegant homepage of a corporate organisation (i.e. not a startup or personal site, and not primarily a sales or campaign site)
2. Bookmark it in Delicious using the magic tag ‘goodcorpweb’ along with other descriptive tags e.g. the sector, the style and anything else that’s relevant
3. It will magically appear at: http://www.helpfultechnology.com/goodcorpweb for anyone to browse and discover
   

Between us, we can give corporate web teams the world over a useful collection of great inspirations for a tricky interface design challenge. Thanks!