Our old blog was launched in 2012 and over the years more than 2,000 posts have been published on it. We know that over this time we have built up a dedicated audience of readers who love to hear more about what we do.
But at over a decade old, the blog was starting to look a bit tired. It was hard to find on our website, if you didn’t know where to look, and its design and limited features weren’t allowing us to tell our stories in the best way possible.
We decided it was time for a change. An opportunity to reach you, our readers, better and give you a much improved experience when you read our posts.
This is just a small part of a much bigger project to reimagine our website and move over to a new design and new underlying technology. We have been developing all the features that a modern website needs and over the coming months you will notice more and more of it looking refreshed and hopefully much more easy to use.
While we’re excited about this new beginning, if you came here looking for a post from our old blog, never fear. All old posts will be available forever in the UK Government Web Archive.
New features
The new blogs have been created in house by a team of developers, designers, content specialists and user experience experts from The National Archives Digital Services team. They have been created using components and styles from our new Design System.
New features include:
- A cleaner, easier to read design
- Transcripts on images of documents, to help you get even closer to the story
- Clearer author credits and links to profiles of our authors so you can better understand who has written the post you’re enjoying.
Our design and features have all been thoroughly tested to make sure they are as usable as possible for our readers with access needs. We hope that if you use assistive technology, you will notice an improvement in your experience of National Archives blogs.
New themes
We’ve also restructured our blogs to make sure they are themed on clearer topics, so it’s easier for you to find posts on subjects that interest you.
The collection
If you’re interested in the kind of stories that we’re discovering in our records, are looking for tips on how to conduct your own research, or perhaps want to find out more about how we care for our records, the collection blog is the place for you.
A newly released photo of Anthony Blunt, featured in a post from our MI5: Official Secrets exhibition curator in our collection blog.
Our research projects
If academic research is your thing, the our research projects blog will be of interest. There you can find out about the interdisciplinary academic research our experts are conducting with our records. You will also hear directly from our PhD students on the work they are doing while studying with us.
In a post for our research projects blog, conservation science expert Marc Vermeulen shares fascinating new research into a pioneering early photographic process.
Community outreach
Perhaps you work in community outreach and want to know more about the work our teams are doing to bring archives to our communities around the country. In our community outreach blog we will be sharing case studies from our work and the latest thinking on outreach and engagement work in the archives sector.
Our community outreach blog features updates like this post on our new multimedia resource for LGBTQ+ History Month.
Digital
And finally if you are interested in the latest technological thinking, our digital blog will be of interest. Our digital specialists, from developers and product managers, to archivists, user researchers and cataloguing specialists will be sharing their work. Here you’ll also find announcements of new features we’ve developed for our services.
On our digital blog you can find out how we have been developing new services, right down to the design of something as deceptively simple as a button.
What’s next?
We’re confident that our new blogs are a big improvement, and we’re excited to launch them today. But we’re sure that there will be even more improvements we can make. We will be monitoring usage numbers and feedback we get, as we continue to research what our users need from the blog. We will continue to iterate on the design and functionality over time.
If you’d like to let us know what you think of the new blog, please consider filling in our short survey below. You’ll also find a link to it at the top of every blog post.
smartsurvey.co.uk
Website feedback survey
Give us your feedback on your experience of the new blogs. Your comments will help us improve our services.
