I worked with the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport on a website to support community engagement with Her Majesty the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee celebrations.
Working from the winning emblem designed by Edward Roberts, I worked iteratively with the DCMS team on a simple design that treads a line between the design languages of Government, the Royal Household and something more informal and participative.
The site was built on a new starter theme framework based on WordPress’ bare-bones Underscores framework, and Bootstrap 5. It incorporated a flexible custom page-builder system so much of the site can share the same modular template.
Content was structured using custom post types and custom fields, with a workflow system to process user-contributed submissions smoothly for approval and give editors control over how and where items are listed.
It was a fascinating site to work on, seeing how some of the new digital controls for government web projects work in practice. For instance, the site was independently audited for privacy compliance, and for accessibility conformance, and we worked hard to ensure it follows good practice.
With help and advice from associates, I helped to scale and support the site over the Jubilee weekend in June 2022, serving over 1.2m visitors per day at the peak, and ranking above the BBC and Royal household websites in organic search results. It achieved over 5m organic clicks.
The project was based on iterative sprints of development work to help the site grow and evolve as the wider plans around the event took shape, and I helped to the manage the retirement of the site and archiving by The National Archives at the end of the year.