Now, the boy can do words, pictures and what users like but, to be frank, couldn’t code his way out of a paper bag. In fact, getting him to make a cup of tea involves a map, a torch and painstaking discussions on the essential nature of the word “kettle”.

It does sound a bit of a risk entrusting the care of our corporate site to somebody challenged by the technical problems of turning on a light switch. But we had a secret weapon: WordPress.

WordPress is the free, open source, Web 2.0 content management system. It is so simple to use that if you can handle Microsoft Word documents (or not in the case of Stewart) then you can make WordPress work for you.

As well as offering simpicity it can also be as complex as you need. And this is where the rest of us weighed in with our technical expertise. This site uses a heavily customised version of the Atahualpa theme. To make it as sophisticated as we wanted it to be we’ve given it a cocktail of plugins that we have found to be particularly effective – though some  needed a tweak or two.  These range from SEO to mobile versions to video display and beyond.

As for how the new site looks, it’s less Stalinist than the previous version but remains true to web guru Clay Shriky’s dictum: “behaviour first, design second”.

In fact many would be better off building their websites on cost-effective open source blogging tools like Wordpress rather than spending tens of thousands of pounds on bespoke solutions. There is nothing particularly radical in this. The sites of both No 10 Downing Street and the Wales Office were built on Wordpress.

Wordpress is easy to use, flexible and comes with an awe-inspiring array of plugins that will keep your site ahead of the curve. The plugins are simple to install and, among many other things, allow you to optimise your site for search engines, link up all your social networking activity and boost traffic. Also, a Wordpress site does not need to look like a blog. It can have a professional design and all the functionality that makes it so powerful.

This site is built on Wordpress (though this is supposed to look like a blog) and we are performing a Wordpress migration for a client at the moment.

But it’s not just about saving money. Clients who go down this route can spend their money on making their messages more interesting to their target audiences – thus making that spend work harder. 

Our bearded Content Marketing Director, Stewart Kirkpatrick, was recently quoted in a Sunday Herald piece about blogging journalists on the importance of content in making a site work:

 ”Attracting an audience is not so easy. You need to make sure the content is frequently updated, that you’re saying something unique and reaching out to [others].”

(Stewart also recently wrote a piece for journalism.co.uk on the plight of Scotland’s papers and the need for them to improve their content and websites.)

Hotfoot from ScotWeb2 – a get-together of those with an interest in the public sector and the internet. Organised by Alex Stobart, a recovering civil servant, 

The highlights, apart from my workshop on making the most of content, were talks by James Munro of PatientOpinon and Simon Dickson of Puffbox.

James’s described how his site offered patient feedback on NHS services. He demonstrated that inviting the public into the conversation, even with negative comments, led to positive outcomes. He also demonstrated PatientOpinon’s automated tagging system for comment, which was one of my “wow” moments of the year.  

Simon Dickson caused everyone’s ears to wring with his revelation that the Foreign and Commonwealth Office website cost £19.2m, with the CMS alone costing £1.47m.  Staggered by this he set up a business that builds websites using WordPress, which costs zilch.

This event was a great start to the coming debate over how public sector websites embrace the future.