I've mentioned before that we plan to refresh the look and feel of our blogs in line with our website.
There are a few things ahead of blogs in the queue (including our 250 embassy sites), but we've started the work.
If you're interested in this stuff, you can take a look at our initial wireframes (below). These are based on: some work we've done to identify and prioritise user goals, our evaluation of the impact of Foreign Office blogs, known issues with our current interface, and our own (me, Shane, Rob) personal prejudice.
We think we need 4 main templates:
1. a homepage for individual bloggers, displaying the most recent blogs
2. a blog entry, displaying comments and a form
3. a homepage for blogs.fco.gov.uk
4. an alternative homepage for themed blog aggregators (eg: blogs.fco.gov.uk/climate)
But we realise that we need to do a few other things differently, including:
- improving the user journeys between our blogs and our other content
- provide our users with alternative ways to find what they're after
- integrate other relevant web content better, particularly for those bloggers who have wide social media profiles
This will be an iterative process. I expect lots of red pen on the wireframes before you see any changes on our blogs. We haven't tested any of this yet, and we won't have got it right first time. But my aim is for our blogs to have a facelift early in 2010. If you have a view please post a comment.
NB: we are not reviewing our technical blog platform as part of this work - we'll do that separately. And it's not about the impact and reach of our blogs - I'll post more on that soon. It's solely about branding and the user interface.
Posted at 16:49 15 December 2009 by Stephen Hale | Comments[7]
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New look Foreign Office website
If you looked at the Foreign Office website over the weekend, you might have noticed that it didn't look quite the same as it used to, and that the content wasn't quite structured in the same way.
We've made some changes to design, information architecture and content. We've aimed for high impact pages - using bold imagery - that give us more scope for editorial flexibility. And we've tried to provide a much clearer hierarchy of stories, guiding readers to Foreign Office priorities, as well as serving our users needs better.
We applied the changes on Saturday, and there's still some work to do tidying up content in the new templates. But this is an iterative programme of improvements rather than a relaunch. We'll follow up the changes to our main site by doing the same thing for our social media content (including our blogs), and our country websites.
I'm really pleased with the changes, and excited by what we can do with our new pages, particularly in our new Global issues channel, which will be the focus for most of our campaigns and digital engagement work. But I'd be really interested to hear what you think. Have we achieved what we set out to?
Posted at 14:17 26 October 2009 by Stephen Hale | Comments[9]
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