ONS Digital

Prynhawn da / Good afternoon and welcome to another round-up from the digital team at ONS

So what’s been happening?

The final touches have been put to the programme for ‘Data Storytelling in Government’ taking place this Thursday at the National Audit Office The event, which has received an overwhelming response, brings together an exciting line-up of experts from the likes of Fullfact, FT Interactive and Geckoboard. We will bring you an update on how the event went and hopefully share the presentations next week.

In other news

It was a quiet week for us in Digital Content, due to the amount of releases published. We produced an infographic on Adult Health in Great Britain and worked with the regional team to promote a story on House Prices through twitter. Our editorial team are also working with economic specialists to help explain how money flows in the economy and what £billions and £trillions actually look like.

A number of the team responsible for improving the accessibility and findability of our content attended a in-house course on Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). The course gave them insight into how search works, what affects search ranking, how to increase the ranking of content and tools to monitor ranking. Feedback has been very positive, especially from those working to implement the new metadata standards project. We also attended a Mobile UX training course with Webcredible looking at the opportunities and challenges of designing for mobile devices.

We have completed a piece of research into CSV files to find out if there are any industry standards that apply to their production and how to maximise their usability.

Our Head of Social Media has left us… well for 6 weeks anyway, as he takes up a secondment at No.10 to work with the Digital Communications Team. This is an exciting learning opportunity to experience the use of social media in a fast paced, public facing department and we look forward to hearing all about it when he gets back.

and finally…

Today sees the ONS hold its first economic forum, where we explain, take questions on and discuss a range of issues and developments relating to ONS economic statistics. Interested? Then follow the discussions.