from the civil service to the west coast of Ireland and beyond

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.