ONS Digital

Bore Da/Good Morning

This week’s update is brought to you a little later than usual, due me being on a training course yesterday, which for once, I actually found very useful.

A small group of us in Digital Publishing Division attended the ‘Command the English Language’ course’, run by Civil Service Learning  as we felt that we needed to be beyond reproach, when positioning ourselves as the organisation’s centre of excellence for digital publishing. The aim was to demystify the rules of English; improve our grammar and spelling and help us become more confident in producing more accessible content. We were introduced to the Rhetorical Triangle, a useful tool, which focuses on three key steps when writing content to ensure it makes an impact. ONS products were used as examples to demonstrate how misuse of words and phrases can confuse the reader, leading to misunderstanding our data. Overall, the course was a useful benchmarking exercise in our own abilities and provided us with a range of techniques that we will be able to share wider.

Other News….

Our editorial team developed a Census based story  that analysed English proficiency of people in the UK.  Supported by a clear and simple infographic produced by our design team, the results showed that people who had lower proficiency in English were more likely to report worse levels of health.

Due to technical changes we made to our publishing processes in the Summer, we have redesigned our internal publishing training course so that it fits into one day instead of four. This will benefit all areas of the organisation, as it reduces the amount of time required for training, enabliing staff to focus on the statistics.

We have finally got access to our new DAM (Digital Asset Management) domain which will be hosting our digital assets library. This project has been in planning for a long time but we are now able to move now from a trial to a full working environment. The library will be used for storing and browsing our corporate digital assets including branding, corporate images/photography and video and we will start to upload content over the next few weeks.

And to finish….
Over the weekend, our revamped About ONS page went live. This has been a mammoth task with thousands of items needing to be unpublished then republished, not to mention the amount of redirects, editing processes and just finding people to own the content. This project has been a real learning curve for us and one which we think others will benefit from. Watch out for our post  on the trials and tribulations we faced later this week.