ONS Digital

Siwmae, croeso i’r “weeknotes”.

I’m Lisa, and I’m the Welsh speaking  communications manager for Digital Publishing Division.

This is the very first weeknotes, and my first blog post for that matter, unless you count the editorial role I played with the recent post on our subscription provider.

As I don’t work a Friday, our week notes refers to what we did the previous week and may even include some of the what’s coming up, if  I’m a bit low on content.

So what’s been happening? Well firstly the most used word of last week had to be interviews! Recruitment to bring the team up to full strength has been underway for some time due to a number of reasons, which those of you  involved in recruiting the civil service way.will be able to empathise with. We have now filled most of the roles that were advertised in our post Join the team and look forward to the experience and expertise these people will bring.

Secondly, a lot of last week was taken up with the work we are doing to improve the search functionality of our site.  Consultancy firm Flax, experts in open source search solutions, interviewed a range of internal and external users of the website to get a feel for the main issues and understand what the priorities need to be. We had involvement from academics, media researchers, economists and business professionals to ensure that the changes we make benefit the user journey experience for everyone.

Thirdly, infographics and how to use them, have been an ongoing issue since the organisation began embracing them (a little too hard some might say). Over the last few weeks our in-house  design specialists have been working with an industry expert to produce a set of guidelines to help with producing and publishing infographics to a consistent high standard.

Other stuff includes developments in the way we engage through our social media channels, building on the success of our  GDP storify as well as working with our statisticians to help them monitor their own releases using hootsuite – so watch this space to see how that works out.