Post by Roland, Corporate Digital Team, Welsh Government
Darllenwch y dudalen hon yn Gwmraeg
We’re a multidisciplinary team, whose work is crucial to realising the vision for services in the Digital Strategy for Wales.
What we mean by GOV.WALES
GOV.WALES is not a single website or service, it’s a range of related products developed to a set of common standards:
- core, our primary site at www.gov.wales
- services, for example search for an apprenticeship vacancy
- tools, for example check if you’re eligible for the Childcare Offer for Wales
- microsites, for example Business Wales
- campaigns, for example help us to help you
- organisations, for example Welsh Revenue Authority
We directly manage the platform for the core site at www.gov.wales, some tools and most campaigns and organisations. This means things like hosting, content management tools, domain names and information architecture. We also directly manage some content.
However, GOV.WALES is bigger than the core site and we do not directly manage most services or microsites. We own the GOV.WALES standards and support the colleagues who own services and microsites to apply them.
Why we have common standards
Common standards mean:
- new products are faster to develop as they simply follow established patterns (no need to repeat similar work defining patterns for each product)
- product teams have more time to focus on their unique challenges (using the time saved by following common patterns)
- Welsh Government has a consistent online identity, building trust and clearly identifying its work
Team composition
We’re a group of professionals working in a range of DDaT roles including:
- interaction designer
- content designer
- frontend developer
- software developer
- delivery manager
- product manager
We’re flexible and work on areas outside our main Digital and Data Profession Capability Framework role. This tends to mean working on closely related areas, for example a content designer working on parts of an accessibility specialist’s role.
Our priorities
There’s a huge range of ongoing work and improvement to keep us busy:
- GOV.WALES Global Experience Language (GEL) design reviews, ensuring new products follow standards
- content quality and accessibility monitoring, ensuring services are easy to use for as many people as possible
- community management, for example supporting content designers across our products
- platform management, ensuring the sites and services we manage work quickly and reliably
- analytics, ensuring data quality and encouraging effective use
- governing requests for new or changed products
To support all this work, we maintain comprehensive standards and guidance for GOV.WALES.
Longer term priorities include:
- producing a GOV.WALES GEL component library to support consistency and efficiency
- applying AI to our work, for example to improve content quality
- refining site search, considering new technologies including AI
Share your thoughts and find out more
We’ll be posting about specific work in more detail, comment on this post or email us at digital@gov.wales.