Not just a pretty face: meet the new vic.gov.au
Last Thursday we launched the online entry point to the Victorian Government, vic.gov.au on our Single Digital Presence (SDP) platform.
In the same week, we also launched Recognition Matters, to encourage people to nominate exceptional women for public honours and the Victorian Government Graduates Program, a promotional site to encourage new grads to consider a career in the public service. Both of these sites are on vic.gov.au.
A couple of years ago these last 2 campaigns would have been separate sites costing 10s of thousands of dollars. Advertising would also have been purchased as the sites were new and weren’t ranking well on Google. They would probably have Google Analytics but no one would tell the vendor to add a Was this page helpful to the template as Victorian Government standards require. This would mean when the content had too much ‘government speak’ in it no one would know because the audience had no way to tell us. In the rush, PDF assets would get created but no one would build HTML pages to go with them. This would mean accessibility requirements weren’t met and the content wasn’t easy to access on a mobile phone.
Neither of these campaign areas was in scope or even a concept when we first looked at what SDP would be. In fact, the need to build them was only uncovered in December. Because they used SDP, these campaigns used their money on user research instead of a website build.
Now they are a clear example of not only how our platform is saving taxpayer money but also improving outcomes for Victorians.
Rewind to where we started
When I moved from the private sector to work within the Victorian Government almost 5 years ago there were a few things I wanted to achieve. One was rethinking our approach to how we presented information online.
This wasn’t simply about launching new, prettier, faster websites but looking at how we approached delivery from end to end. It was about creating a repeatable process with a supporting toolset to help the Victorian Government create websites. It wasn’t about becoming the internal digital agency for the government.
Our first question
A very early question in this journey was “how do we design better government information and services?” which helped better define the customer problem we were facing. Have a look at my first blog post for more
Delivering on this vision, we developed the 3 products of SDP. I am not going to go into the tech here because it was covered earlier in a blog post by our tech lead Kurt, here is the link.
With SDP we have created an enterprise-grade product suite to help digital teams (in our case)across government and their delivery partners to deliver better, more consistent websites.
How we approached content
So more about our processes and why they were so important…
You would have seen some blog posts written by Emma here and here which talked about our approach to content, including plain language and pair writing. Our publishing principles are that content should be written for our end user, not for the government. This principle had a huge effect on how we wrote, how content was branded and how it was presented. For content to be on its own branded site the brand needed to have value for our end user. We also aim to have our content written at a year 8 reading comprehension level. Finally, we link content around topics, not around government structures.
What vic.gov.au now offers across government
The new vic.gov.au has been delivered by SDP with a content management system (CMS) built for government needs and with the consistent user experience.
New features include:
- Easy to use templates to support quick and cost-effective delivery of campaign sites
- Simple grants template for government grants and programs, resulting in a consistent experience
- Improved search functionality to help users find grants
- New online form to enable VPS and the community to submit events for moderated publishing
- Content from the Department of Premier and Cabinet (DPC) corporate website is now on vic.gov.au
Next steps for vic.gov.au
So now that we have launched vic.gov.au the work doesn’t stop here. Our content team will focus its energies on moving more and more sites within DPC onto the SDP platform and into vic.gov.au
Our SDP product team will continue to roll out new features from our roadmap and we are already collaborating with other Victorian Government departments to move their digital presence on to the platform. We should see the next few sites launching in a few weeks.
Open source and others already on the SDP platform
SDP was developed as an open source platform that allows government agencies to host, manage and publish content. The team has spoken about this in a few other blogs so I won’t go into a huge about of detail.
What it has provided us is a platform to bring consistency to content management, presentation and publishing across Victorian Government. Although it’s still early days I’m proud to say we have already seen a number of sites launched on SDP by other departments, with the help of a number of great Victorian digital agencies. Check out these sites:
We would love some feedback, have a look at www.vic.gov.au and let us know what you think.
Get involved.
As I mentioned earlier, the whole platform is open source so feel free to grab it, play with it, reach out to tell us what you think and ideally collaborate with us to make it better. We’re on GitHub.
A BIG thanks
Getting us this point has been a huge effort by many individuals and organisations over 18 months of research and development. I would like to acknowledge all of you who have been part of this journey. A big shout out to our collaborators and vendor partners Salsa Digital, Today, Portable, Savage Bull, Deepend, Amazee, Huddle, Wunderman, Revolution IT, Bugwolf, IP Sec, Paper Giant and Orima.
To our team here at DPC, you have taken an idea and have not only made it real but have taken it to a whole new level through SDP. I want to thank you all for the considerable amount of yourselves you have invested in making this real. The late nights, the many meetings, pushing yourselves to constantly do better are all recognised and appreciated.
Thanks to:
Amber Benjafield, Anthony Malkoun, Bridget Kelly, Carolynne Hamilton, Conan Tran, Dori Maniatakis, Duncan Legge, Dylan Kelly, Emma Cameron, Guy Owen, James Tsividis, Jeremy McMillan, Jessica Le, Joanna Tayler, Kurt Foster, Lucy Wilby, Marcella Marino, Mark Ji, Meagan Carlsson, Megan Vassarotti, Mike Laidlaw, Ming Sheng Quah, Nicole Shilo, Sibel Kurtgozoglu, Sophie Turner, Stacey Kaye, Tim Yao, and Vanessa Scott.
And thanks to our past alumni who had a huge impact on our build: Richard Burke, Sarah Ingles, and Courtney Foon.
