Internal audience only
Due to the terms of the Civil Service Code for former employees, I am unable to publish screen shots of my work during my 4 years as an Intranet Developer.
I have hard copies of sites I have produced and would be happy to talk through
them at any face to face meeting.
The National Insurance Contributions Office (NICO) is a department of HM Revenue & Customs, the tax collecting arm of the UK government. Specifically, NICO are responsible for the collection and administration of UK National Insurance.
The NICO Intranet is a large-scale site that is used on a daily basis by 4,500 users, with a potential audience of over 100,000 staff in HMRC.
As the primary communication channel for NICO, information on the site varies from short lived news stories to permanent items such as important guidance and instructions for staff to do their jobs. With such an emphasis on the site to meet people’s information needs on a daily basis, the site naturally grew as more files were added and at one stage, it ballooned to over 56,000 pages.
At the point that I left NICO for my new job, the file count had been reduced to a manageable 27,000 pages but this was down to a 6 month stocktake project I led to remove duplicate/out of date information that was still being retained.
With such a large amount of information, navigation is key to the user experience so the site is separated into logical functional categories that are accessible from a standard left sided navigation placed consistently on every page. This logical separation is continued in the back end with sub sites and sub folders mirroring the naming convention of the navigation
Primary navigation is supplemented with breadcrumbs in the header bar of each page and this was particularly useful if you entered a page as the result of a search as it gives an immediate indication of the how far down the levels a piece of information is.
The site was created with HTML, CSS and Javascript and during my time in the role, I led the evolution of the site from a 3 frame approach into a more mature single page format using positional <div> tags to segment areas of the page. Branding and colour scheme are controlled through CSS and interactive features using form elements are included where necessary to enhance the user experience.
Management of the site is centralised to a single team who use a CMS I created to monitor expiration dates and log meta information about each page. Due to limitations of the web architecture this CMS is not hooked into the web server so live updating is not possible.
Content on the site is created locally by non-publishing authors before it is handed over to the NICO Communications Team for formatting and publishing via FTP in FrontPage.
For 4 years I was the lead Intranet Developer for NICO, providing technical expertise and direction on all projects for the site. I also supervised a team of developers and acted as line manager for a junior member of staff.
In my time on the team, I was given full control of the site including responsibility to manage and implement two major 6 month projects to review and amend the Intranet structure. The first project was a stocktake of existing content and was aimed at removing unnecessary duplication, improving the structure and providing consistency of approach across all pages. For the second project, I led a team of 6 people to migrate the site from the previous 3 frame structure to a single page approach with common elements being included via JavaScript based includes.
In addition to being the technical expert on the team, I was also the Web and Accessibility Champion for NICO and this was a role I relished, offering advice to colleagues in the business on creating semantic content, accessible features and standards compliant code. This wasn't always easy because of the pressures from above to communicate quickly but hey, if it was easy, anyone could do it!
As well as controlling the coding approach for HTML and CSS files (including creating a data dictionary/format guide for the classes), I created and controlled a JavaScript library of object orientated reusable code that was available for my colleagues. All of the functions were held in external files and their complexity ranged from simple scripts like outputting the current date to more complex features like dynamically updated hyperlinks.
One script I was particularly proud of let users record information from a bomb threat and then email it to security personnel. The script took input from form elements and then dynamically created a new page that reformatted the input into categorised profile information about the caller/details of the bomb. What pleased me most about it was that my approach was 100% object orientated and could be used on any page that had form elements (assuming the naming syntax was maintained of course!)
As well as taking the lead on major projects I was the Account Manager for all Intranet related queries in NICO, providing a steer and advice to senior managers on how to promote their initiatives to online and offline audiences. I loved doing this as it gave me the chance to educate people about how the web is only one channel in a communication strategy as well as giving me the chance to deliver on every new initiative that was introduced.
Looking back on NICO, it was four great years in my career and I really feel that this was where I ‘served my time’ and confirmed that the web is something I will be passionate about forever.