Advancements in technology open up new avenues of opportunity, allowing many to achieve what was once the preserve of a specialised few. This should however come with a caveat: just because technology enables you to do something, doesn't mean you should. Before the modern Content Management System (CMS), publishing to the web was a technical endeavour. Many early websites were built with hand-crafted HTML, and while applications such as MS Frontpage and Dreamweaver, and database-driven platforms that with PHP and Classic ASP front ends later reduced the need to code every single page, you still required a significant degree of technical knowledge to publish. The advent of CMS, and later Enterprise CMS, opened up content creation, allowing anyone with basic IT skills to edit and add content, and over the following years we saw the consequence: a proliferation of truly awful websites. In some cases, these were vast digital estates containing tens of thousands of pages, authored by h...
It’s often been fun, occasionally frustrating, always fulfilling, but this is my final week employed in local government. There are few types of organisation that deliver a similar volume and variety of functions as local government Beyond emptying bins and fixing potholes we see so often in the media, there’s social care (often portrayed as just a NHS function), housing, roads, public transport, education, planning, leisure (including sports centres), culture (including libraries), and very much more. Working part of a digital team in a council it's likely you’ll engage with every department across the organisation during the course of a year, offering real variety whatever role you’re in. The next few years will see a huge change across local government, not only in the 21 English counties invited to go through reorganisation (LGR), but through devolution, and everywhere as a result the continued stretch on public finances and rising public expectations driven by the acceleratin...