ONS Digital

Prynhawn da / Good afternoon and welcome to this week’s round-up from the Digital Publishing team at ONS.

So what’s been happening?

We published a release on marriages, where the main story seemed to be the increase in people aged between 65 and 69 getting married.  This release was supported by a 9 facts about marriages listical for use on social media as well as a “what’s your I do IQ? quiz which we introduced for the first time on our facebook page. We also produced a number of infographics as part of the monthly release on Labour Market Statistics looking at the latest changes to employment figures  and the number of people working in the public sector.

In other news

We experienced a few publishing challenges during the early part of last week due to problems with our Content Management System (CMS) but the team worked hard to ensure that we met publishing deadlines with minimal impact to users.

There was a lot of interest in our economic time series page, which provides users with quick access to the current and historical data for ONS key economic time series and economic indicators.  We are now looking into the possibilities of adding more of our indicators to this page as well as creating something similar for more socially based statistics such as population.

Wikimedia UK, the UK chapter of Wikimedia have been talking about working with ONS to make statistics more accessible. and we have been looking at ways to support our group of wiki-editors so that they have the time to source and edit pages about ONS and its publications.

We have been doing some further work on accessibility,  using web-metrics to identify the most popular PDFs, matching these with the list of non-accessible PDFs given to us by Shaw Trust and then working to make them accessible. We have also published a new accessibility video.

We also published some insight to help us optimise our social media content by looking into the kind of messages which drives our users to the website or encourages them to spend longer when they are there. You can get the latest news on user insight projects @ONS by signing up to the alerts.

and finally…

We are delighted to have been shortlisted for an ONS Exellence award under the categories of Employee Engagement (for the Digital Festival) and Communication (for our work on divorces).

For the last seven years the ONS Excellence Awards have recognised outstanding work across the office, and as a new division, for us to be nominated, let alone shortlisted is testimony to the digital ground we have made.

The finalists will be announced tomorrow, so watch this space for news of how we did.