Blog posts
We published 3 blog posts this week:
These posts illustrate that reaching the end of discovery or alpha is not in itself necessarily the best reason for publishing a blog post. Rather, we need a good angle – some aspect of the work with wider relevance.
For example, the Natural Resources Wales post highlights content design lessons the development of the hazardous waste service brought about. The DLR post is about the end of alpha – but it looks forward to what the team will be doing in beta (rather than dwelling on what’s already happened).
End of alpha report
We also published the substantial DLR end of alpha report; the report not only, significantly, publicises the 16 ‘opportunities’ the DLR discovery identified for improving Welsh public services – it also was a great learning opportunity for the comms team in publishing accessible, engaging content in our WordPress content management system (CMS).
The report was a reminder, too, that preparing good content is time-consuming: we had to strip down and rewrite all the text, format everything in style, recreate all the charts from the source material as accessible HTML, write alt text, find appropriate images, proofread and so on. Happily we learned plenty of useful lessons for preparing future reports – as well as gaining insights into the strengths and weaknesses of our content CMS.
CMS tweaks
Speaking of the CMS, as we publish we’re also making notes for potential changes to our publishing platform: for instance, allowing us to tweak the wording of the headline link as it appears on the home page (and elsewhere) so it fits on a certain number of lines – standard production stuff that we can’t do at the moment.
On the same front, we’re also going to sign up with more image libraries, as the freebies from Unsplash, etc, featuring Welsh + digital themes will no doubt run out soon. Plus, there’s also the risk of one of the same images cropping up to advertise a dog-biscuit start-up (or whatever).
‘Year in Review’ report
Latest steps in preparation of the annual report (which we’re tentatively calling ‘Year in Review’) were to send an email to delivery leads asking how, in detail, they had contributed to CDPS’s meeting its objectives in 2021-22. Simon has also lined up potential video and design agencies – with a view to making the report an engaging, multimedia piece of content that exemplifies our approach to publishing.
Events
Knowledge sharing webinar: Digital Strategy for Wales - one year on
March’s knowledge sharing webinar was about the Digital Strategy for Wales, a year after its launch. Taking part were Lee Waters, Deputy Minister for Climate Change; Clare Pillman, representing Natural Resources Wales; Liam Hull, from Sport Wales; and Chris Owen, from Neath Port Talbot Council.
We had 55 attendees in the audience, from organisations such as Wales Cooperative Centre, the Welsh Local Government Association, Welsh Government and local councils.
Watch the time-stamped recording: