Oh wow I’m late with these, so just the edited highlights.
Things stepped up a gear on our CMS migration, with Placecube in full migration planning mode. We should be getting our plan to consider this week, then it’s full steam ahead
We had two more training sessions from them this week; another generic CMS session for the content designers, and a more specific one around microsite creation. I’m starting to write some notes on microsites so that others can tread the same path as me without making the same mistakes and having to back-track.
Dave, our Placecube developer, continues to beaver away in the background, flushing our bugs and adding extra styling where needed to our Electric theme. He did a great job of styling up Guide pages to match the GDS theme and echoing our styling heroes in Essex. I was stupidly pleased with how it looked!
We’ve also started to look at data privacy in the context of the customer account. I’m keen for us to adopt a data minimisation approach to just capture what we really need to deliver a service.
The content designers continue to knock it out of the park:
Because they all work so independently I don’t always get to see or appreciate the hard work they do, I just know they are way better at it than me. Thursday saw me attempt to launch our new COVID page but in the process manage to take it down altogether, taking about 90 mins to get it back up. Maybe leave this stuff to the experts.
Part of getting my hand in on this is to better appreciate the demands that the content designers face, and some of the nonsense. I had a 10 email exchange over a single, unnecessary page request which I held out on right to the end. It’s easy to see why council websites can grow exponentially — we really need to get the balance right and focus on user needs.
Talking of which, I could have cried with delight during a follow-up meeting on dedicated web pages for local councils. Our lovely Comms manager, one of our best allies, almost word-for-word echoed my concerns about the approach that had been suggested and decided that some proper user research was a better way to go than just reacting to a best-guess request.
Almost all boxes unpacked, the kitchen working a charm, fresh bread every other day from the breadmaker…..life in lockdown is pretty good here in Dorset. Well, apart from our lousy oil-fired heating and hot water system, which is not dealing with the cold snap well. And really stinks of oil
On Friday we had an initial survey visit from an air source heating supplier to check over what we could do. All very positive given the recent build of the house (thank God we didn’t get that 15th century thatched moneypit cottage) so if the quote is OK we could end up with a new system installed in about 4 weeks. Oh to have a hot bath again….