The information in this blogpost may now be out of date. See the current GOV.UK content and publishing guidance.
We’ve recently upgraded the ‘featuring’ interface for GOV.UK publishers. For the first time, you can promote items that live outside the ‘departments and policy’ section of GOV.UK - such as blogposts and services. We’ve also improved the way you can search for items to feature.
This blogpost tells you what’s changed, and what you’ll now be able to feature.
Where you can ‘feature’ things
Four different types of page allow you to ‘feature’ content items in the bank of promotional slots at the top of the page:
- organisation homepages (eg www.gov.uk/bis)
- topic homepages (eg www.gov.uk/government/topics/defence-and-armed-forces)
- topical event pages (eg www.gov.uk/budget2014)
- worldwide location pages (www.gov.uk/government/world/usa)
Up until now, these types of pages have all had slightly different featuring interfaces, and different things you could feature. We’ve standardised all of these, and improved the user interface across the board.
What you can feature
As was previously the case with organisation pages, you can feature:
- content items that exist within the Departments and Policy area of GOV.UK (eg, items within Publisher)
- topical events (e.g. the Budget)
However, you can now also feature links to destinations and content types that sit outside Publisher. These are:
- blogposts (eg the Civil Service org page could feature a blogpost by Bob Kerslake)
- alerts (eg the Environment Agency org page could feature flood warnings)
- campaigns (eg the Department of Health could feature the Dementia Challenge)
- services (eg the International Aid topic could feature the Development Tracker)
- careers (eg the Department for Education could feature Get into Teaching)
There are a couple of restrictions on the featuring of destinations outside GOV.UK:
- you can only feature links to .gov.uk domains
- the majority of your featured links should point to destinations within GOV.UK
There are 6 promotional slots available, but you don’t have to use all of them.
Next steps
Go play. Tell us what works, and what doesn’t. As always, we’ll be looking to learn from your feedback.
We'll feature examples of things that people are trying out on this page (e.g., see HMRC's promotion of tax credits).
Oh - and while you’re making changes to your promotions, perhaps take the opportunity to:
- review your ‘top tasks’ box and remove things which don’t really need to be there (as we’ve mentioned previously, top tasks should be limited to covering the major things that users come to your homepage to do)
- see if our new way of promoting services could benefit your users
Keep in touch. Sign up to email updates from this blog, or follow Graham on Twitter.
9 comments
Comment by Liz posted on
Following the Department of Health digital strategy, Public Health England's campaigns are going to stay on http://www.nhs.uk, along with our other 'mainstream' content. It would be fantastic to be able to feature something like Change4Life (http://www.nhs.uk/change4life/Pages/change-for-life.aspx) on our homepage and indeed on any relevant topic homepages. Might you consider including .nhs.uk domains?
Comment by Graham Francis posted on
Hi Liz - sounds like a reasonable request.
Comment by Marisol posted on
Hooray! That's great news. Thanks, Graham.
Comment by Umair posted on
Hi Graham. This is a very useful feature. Can I ask why it's only limited to featuring links to gov.uk domains? Any plans to open this out more? Thanks.
Comment by Graham Francis posted on
Hi Umair - possibly - but it'd be good to understand which type of non GOV.UK domains you'd like to link out to?
Comment by Simon R posted on
Hi Graham,
This is really useful. I've already used it to link to GO-Science's latest blog post!
In terms of non-GOV.UK domains, it would be useful if we could link direct to our consultations on https://bisgovuk.citizenspace.com/. Of course we can link to the consultation page on GOV.UK now, but if this just directs people to Citizen Space it would be nice to skip this step.
Comment by Graham Francis posted on
Thanks Simon (as you're the first person to tell us you've used this, we're featuring your homepage on this blogpost now).
Again - seems a reasonable request for an alternative destination.
Comment by Alex posted on
Brilliant - am I OK with linking to Mainstream? We have a campaign at the moment to get people to renew their tax credits... I've featured it but let me know if it's illegal! (www.gov.uk/hmrc).
Comment by Graham Francis posted on
Yup, that's definitely in the spirit of stuff we'd like people to try out - it's topical, and there's an argument that it's something that people might be coming to the HMRC homepage to do (We're picturing your example on this blogpost). Are you able to report back on how well the link is working?