An independent research agency, TNS-BMRB, is conducting research on our behalf during March.

TNS-BMRB has set up a discussion forum where you can post comments about the Passage of a Bill guide, tell us what you like about it and where you think changes can be made.

You will be asked to contribute to the discussion forum each day for four days.

If you would like to contribute to this research, or if you would like more information, please e-mail Elizabeth or Andrew at TNS-BMRB:

• elizabeth.jordan@tns-bmrb.co.uk 
• andrew.hunter@tns-bmrb.co.uk

Latest developments

Following feedback from the Equality Bill exercise we have developed the interwoven idea further. We have posted an experimental version of the Digital Economy Bill on a separate website so that we can experiment with the online presentation of a Bill.

This latest version allows you to move from the clauses of the Bill to the section of the Act the clause will affect. (At present some of the links take you to the Act as originally passed by Parliament and others take you to the updated version of the Act. Ideally all links would take you to the updated Act but for now we hope that this gives you an indication of what we are trying to achieve.)

We have also made improvements to the layout of the interwoven Bill & Explanatory Notes, you now have the option to display relevant explanatory text (taken from the Explanatory Note) below or alongside each clause of the Bill.

There are still several formatting and presentational issues on some browsers, for best results try FireFox or Safari.

Tell us what you think

We would like to hear from you:

• Do you find this version of the Bill helpful?
• Does it help you carry out your work?
• Does it help you understand the purpose and content of the Bill?
• How can we improve the presentation of Explanatory Notes?
• What else could we do to make it easier for you to work with these Bill documents and to make them serve your needs better?

For those more technically minded, our developers would be particularly interested to know:

• Is the use of RDFa useful?
• Should the HTML produced be valid HTML 5?
• Should fragments of Bills be made available, in addition to the whole Bill?
• Should a Bill still be readable on a browser without CSS or Javascript available?

Let us know what you think on the blog comments or by email: webmaster@parliament.uk

Headline Figures

for the whole site

• visitors – 6.7 million, return visitors 1.2 million -  that’s unchanged on visitors but up 0.1 million on return visitors compared to 2008
• visits – 11.1 million – up 0.2 million on 2008
• page views – 48.1 million – this is down 1 million on 2008

for http://www.parliament.uk

• visitors – 3.1 million, return visitors 0.5 million – that’s up 0.4 million visitors and the same number of return visitors for 2008
• visits – 5.4 million – down 0.4 million visits on 2008
• page views – 21.4 million – same number of page views as 2008

for http://www.publications.parliament.uk
This covers parliamentary publications.

• visitors – 4.2 million, return visitors 0.7 million
• visits – 6.8 million
• page views – 25.5 million

Top Five pages on the whole site

1. http://www.parliament.uk (Home Page) – 2.2 million visits
2. Search – 0.5 million visits
3. House of Commons Debates (http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm/cmhansrd.htm) – 0.4 million visits
4. Hansard (http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/pahansard.htm) – 0.3 million visits
5. Bills Before Parliament (http://services.parliament.uk/bills/) – 0.3 million visits

Definitions

Pages – Any displayed page. You can specify for each profile the types of files that qualify as a page. These settings can be changed by the WebTrends administrator.

Visits - Number of visits to this page. A visit is a series of actions that begins when a visitor views the first page from the server, and ends when the visitor leaves the site or remains idle beyond the idle-time limit. The default idle-time limit is thirty minutes. This time limit can be changed by the system administrator.

Views – Number of times this page was viewed by visitors.

YouTube

• www.youtube.com/UKParliament
• 69 videos on the channel - another 22 since June 2009.
• Approx views across all videos: 499,000 (this is views on YouTube,  on our site, or other sites where it’s been embedded) – that’s more than double the figure in June.
• Channel views: about 92,000 – up 25,000 from June.
• Subscribers: 852 – up 385 from June.

Flickr

www.flickr.com/photos/uk_parliament

• 456,376 views since summer 2008 – that’s up about 275,000 from Junes figure (179,430)
• Recently we’ve been averaging approx 500 views per day.
• 51% of these views come from users searching on Flickr.com; 41% from search; 4% from other sites (1% from Parliament.uk) – this is a big change from June with many more views coming from search rather than Flickr and other website.
• Our most popular image is still the photo of Speaker’s  Table.

Twitter

• www.twitter.com/ukparliament
• Regular updates began June 2008.
• Followers: 16,182 – that’s almost double June’s figure.
• Updates: 1796 – another 650 in the last six months.
• Clickthrough on links (according to bit.ly) is usually over 200. With 519 clickthroughs the highest so far. The stats for any of our bit.ly links can be accessed by copying and pasting the bit.ly URL into a browser window, then adding ‘+’.

Facebook

www.facebook.com/pages/London-United-Kingdom/UK-Parliament/16553417732

Launched June 2008 – currently 2,549 fans up from 739 in June.

FriendFeed

http://friendfeed.com/ukparliament

Launched August 2008, aggregating all our social media content, and stories from our news area – 819 subscribers up from 284 in June.

Parliament Labs blog

• http://parliamentlabs.wordpress.com/
• Due to staff changes and work pressures we have not been contributing to the blog as much as we used to, this will hopefully change in 2010.
• 15,000+ views since launching September 2008 – up 5,000 since June 2009.
• 312 views in one day – for our improving Hansard post – is still our busiest day so far.
• 54 posts – that is only 2 more since June (!!).
• 104 comments from members of the public and Web Centre staff across all posts.

For those of you interested in stats I will be publishing a digest of stats for the Parliamentary website in 2009 shortly…

On 22 July, the Parliament web team will interview the new Commons Speaker John Bercow. We want the public to send us their questions to put to the Speaker as part of this exclusive filmed interview and podcast, which we will publish on the Parliament website at the end of July.

1) Linking up with one of Parliament’s primary objectives: to promote public understanding of the work and role of Parliament through the provision of information and access, by

• Informing – ensuring that the public is well-informed about the work and role of Parliament
• Promoting – ensuring that the public values Parliament as an institution
• Listening – engaging the public in ways that reflect their interests

And,

2) Reaching out to people and communities that wouldn’t be visiting the Parliament website.

Evaluation

I realise that stats only tell part of the story, and information on public and internal feedback and traffic back is important. I could write a whole post on the public and internal reaction to us using these tools, but this one is just about the stats. In summary, generally public feedback has been good! And internal departments are now actively looking to use these channels, especially YouTube, Flickr and Twitter.

YouTube

• www.youtube.com/UKParliament
• 47 videos on the channel – started posting videos May 2008
• Approx views across all videos: 224,000 (this is views on YouTube,  on our site, or other sites where it’s been embedded)
• Channel views: 67,000+
• Subscribers: 477

Flickr

www.flickr.com/photos/uk_parliament

• 179,430 views since summer 2008
• Recently we’ve been averaging approx 1000 views per day
• 78% of these views come from users searching on Flickr.com; 13% from Google; 3% from Parliament.uk
• Our most popular image is of the Speaker’s  Table

Twitter

• www.twitter.com/ukparliament
• Regular updates began June 2008
• Followers: 8600
• Updates 1127
• Clickthrough on links (according to bit.ly) is usually over 200. With 519 clickthroughs the highest so far. The stats for any of our bit.ly links can be accessed by copying and pasting the bit.ly URL into a browser window, then adding ‘+’.

Facebook

www.facebook.com/pages/London-United-Kingdom/UK-Parliament/16553417732

Launched June 2008 – 739 fans

We’re starting to do more with our Facebook page, ie, updating it regularly. And it would be good to look at the possibility of developing apps like Number 10 have.

FriendFeed

http://friendfeed.com/ukparliament

Launched August 2008, aggregating all our social media content, and stories from our news area – 284 subscribers.

UK Parliament Google Profile

www.google.com/profiles/ukparliament

Our Google Profile links off to the main areas of the Parliament website and our social media content. Stats are only available for the last 30 days:

Impressions 12438; 1958 Views

Parliament Labs blog

• http://parliamentlabs.wordpress.com/
• 10,000+ views since launching September 2008
• 312 views in one day – for our improving Hansard post – is our busiest day so far.
• 52 posts
• 84 comments from members of the public and Web Centre staff across all posts.

The fruits of our labour can be viewed on our Hansard Beta site. 

What have we done?

Development work is being done in phases.
 
The first phase consists of:

• better layout, with improved content list, font size etc
• better chunking of content – so that you can view/print a whole debate and without having to click on the continue button
• better structure – while this won’t be visible to users, it will help Parliament make further improvements more easily

This release is just the first step.  We want to be able to make better use of this content so that it can be repackaged throughout the website.  To do this we are working with Hansard and Parliamentary ICT department to improve the code.

Lots more to do

A Hansard project is underway looking at all the tools used to create the paper copy of Hansard; we hope the improvements made to the production of Hansard will make it easier for the web team and other websites to reuse this amazingly rich content.

This is only the start; next we want to focus on Hansard by Member, so that each MP or Lords contributions can be easily found, followed and reused.

We would love to hear what you think about the new Hansard pages. Email webmaster@parliament.uk or comment on this post.

The aim during the development of the service was to remain transparent, publicly visible and accountable. Wherever possible, the choice was made to use open source technologies – and to make code and data available, unless legally constrained. The project was delivered using a set of tools and services that have supported our preferred lightweight working practices:

• Distributed version control: git, publicly available and hosted on github
• Issue tracking: Google Code project hosting
• Communication: team members on Twitter, project updates having their own account at @fymp
• Web framework: Apache and Phusion Passenger, Ruby on Rails (using ZenTest and Cucumber for testing and spec assurance), MySQL Community Server
• Hosting and storage: Amazon S3, EC2
• Virtual machine construction: Elastic Server
• Load testing: siege

As recommended by the Procedure Committee, the House of Commons has today published the Equality Bill in a trial format as proposed by Chris Bryant MP, from the Deputy Leader of the House.

The Bill and Explanatory Notes are available as a:

• PDF with both texts side-by-side,
• an HTML with the texts side-by-side, and
• an interwoven web page (HTML)

All versions are available on the Equality Bill page

The Procedure Committee of the House of Commons is interested in feedback on this experiment, specifically:

• Do you find the interleaved document more helpful than the 2 separate documents?
• Which version of the interleaved document do you prefer? The PDF side-by-side, the HTML side-by-side, or the interwoven web page (HTML)?

The Web Centre would like to know your thoughts on this development, do you know of other sites that have this functionality, is there is a better way to present this information.

Let us know what you think on the blog comments or by email: webmaster@parliament.uk

This involved styling the widget Tweetminster already make available so that it fitted with the look of our new redesign, and specifying what Twitter feeds it would use. We wanted the widget to be ‘Parliament on Twitter’ – so it uses our own @ukparliament feed, any MPs or Peers that use Twitter (are there any Peers using Twitter yet?), but no parliamentary candidates, government departments or political parties.

The hope is that using this widget will further promote how Parliament and its Members are trying to engage with social media tools and with the public. During recess it should also give an insight into the work of MPs in their constituencies.  Although, we have included a disclaimer because the Web Centre team is responsible only for the content of @ukparliament updates, not those from Members…

WordPress.com doesn’t like iFrames so below is just a screengrab, to see it working go to our new Get Involved page.