Wales Office – WordPress-ive
Yesterday finally saw the launch of another project I’ve been working on a long time, a new website for the Wales Office.
The Wales Office is part of my department’s ‘family’ for pay and rations purposes and I don’t think anyone would be offended there if I said that their previous online presence was showing its age. I talked with them early last summer about the need to create a new site for them. But at the time I’d just finished developing our new corporate website and didn’t have the appetite or the resource to help them.
But I did know someone who did – Simon Dickson. He’d been grumbling about some proof of concept work he’d done for another government department using WordPress as the content management system that hadn’t been picked up. I didn’t want it to all go to waste so we talked about taking what he’d done and using it for the Wales Office.
It didn’t quite work out that way as Simon produced something infinitely better than his earlier attempt. I can’t take any credit for the way the project was realised – Simon got the bit between his teeth and delivered a fantastic site with all the rich functionality and general goodness that WordPress offers.
Its a testament to the trust of the Wales Office that they bought into the concept and as a consequence now have a fantastic corporate site that should be the envy of other Whitehall departments. Simon tells more here.
(I was) Whitehall Webby 
Hi
Like the new site, esp. the welsh translation. How does it perform accessibility-wise?
Didn’t realise you were involved too, Jeremy – well done!
Well Simon did do all the hard work. I just put them all together and did the convincing – got a better solution with much less grief.
Accessibility-wise its good. WordPress really helps on that score.
A few errors here:
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww2.walesoffice.gov.uk%2F&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=Inline&group=0
Thanks – will check it out.
@futurewww A couple of these are just ‘first day’ HTML tinkering; a few are in the Google Analytics code provided by Google; and I think a few are unfair. The Welsh language version fares much better, incidentally! 🙂