We’ve had a bit of fun this week with the web site. The Navy normally calls this ‘character building’ - I like to call it ‘challenging’! We are a victim of our own success - since the site was upgraded about 4 years ago, our audience base has increased 5 fold and the amount, quality and type of content on the site has exceeded all expectations. As a result, the site infrastructure is struggling to keep up with demand, and it’s taken all the skills of the team and our contractors to keep the site running at a decent speed and with all the functionality we all expect from web sites today. Some of you may have noticed the site has been slow at times, and there’s also been several ‘error 404′ messages appearing on certain pages (if this happens to you - try refreshing the page, or page back, and click through again). For the eagle eyed regular visitors you may have noticed the randomly moving news articles! The most obvious issue has been that our ‘Contact Us’ form has been broken for a number of days. Thankfully everything is now fixed and we are working on our eagerly anticipated upgrade project.
We moved onto new servers earlier in the year and now proudly use state of the art ‘virtual servers’. This move will set us up for the future and ensure that we can support a huge range of ‘rich media’ for you to enjoy throughout the site. The new servers have been optimised and are delivering on all levels. This now means that we can move on to the next phase of upgrading the site.
The next phase involves purchasing a new site infrastructure - called in the trade a CMS - content management system. We have been working hard over the last few months producing the technical spec and trying to second guess what the future holds in store for the digital world. Not only does this involve a degree of guesswork with technological advances - it’s also trying to second guess how our audience will use the internet in the future. For instance, how many people had heard of Twitter 18 months ago ? Who could have predicted how many people would be accessing the internet via their mobile phones as ‘the norm’? It’s exciting times for us - and a real eye opener seeing what is already out there or under development.
Consider that the web team consists of a Marine Engineering Officer, a trainee Pilot Officer, a Chief Photographer and 2 technical civil servants - and you will start to see just how much homework we have to do in the evenings getting to grips with ‘our subject’! When we have our new CMS, the huge task of migrating the content from the website will begin. We hope to launch the new site some time next year - although as we are so early in the process it’s difficult to say at the moment exactly when. We are all really looking forward to it though.
This week we are one team member short due to Summer Leave (we take our leave ona rolling basis so that the web site continues to be updated). Most units and shore establishments are now back from Summer leave, so our ‘In Tray’ is likely to go exponential very quickly. We are also working on the microsite build to support Cadet 150 next year (the sea cadets are celebrating their 150th anniversary) and there are lots of new features coming soon on the careers part of the site.
In summary - exciting times - scary times. Lots of opportunities. Lots of new skills. More ‘ticks in the taskbook of life’ - all in all - another ’standard day’ in the RN !
Speak soon
Helen
