Every year, the TUC hosts an Annual Communication Awards ceremony to celebrate some of the great work being done by unions. I always take particular interest in the awards focused on using technology and digital communication. The awards were revamped a couple of years ago, with the new format having a ‘Best membership communication –

Every June, I update the league table of trade union websites. The 2018 edition can be seen below (Previous results can be seen for 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013 and 2012). It’s important to note that the league table doesn’t attempt to review and score the quality of each site directly. Rather, I use industry leading metrics to measure the influence of

Data Protection laws are undergoing a major upgrade when the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) supersedes the Data Protection Act on the 25th May 2018. These wide-ranging changes are impacting on a number of areas, and one of these is the website privacy statement. Websites have been displaying privacy statements for years, especially since infamous

In a relatively short period of time, smartphones and tablets have completely changed the way we access the web. Long gone is the assumption that each user has a desktop PC. It’s hard to imagine a world now where people don’t spend time glued to the smaller screens of their phones or tablets. While responsive

When websites are redesigned or restructured, one mistake I come across a surprising amount of the time is a failure to use redirects properly. I’ve recently seen this happen on a large, authoritative website for a public sector body. Why are redirects important? Well, when a website changes the address of content or a resource,

Towards the end of every year I take a look at which of the TUC-affiliated unions are the most influential on Twitter. I’ve been doing this for six years, with all previous results available on my blog (2012, 2013, 2014, 2015 and 2016). To measure the influence, I use a tool called Klout, and independent analytics

A couple of years ago, I looked at the sizes of the websites of all the TUC affiliated unions, to see how they compared. I’ve found myself coming back to this analysis quite often. Various unions have wanted an idea of how large their website is compared to others, or have wanted to judge how

One of the latest frontiers in technology is voice controlled smart assistants. Systems like Apple’s Siri, Google Now and Microsoft’s Cortana have been bringing voice controlled commands to mobiles, tablets and desktops over the last few years. However, Amazon raised the stakes by launching the Amazon Echo, a standalone hub designed to allow you to

It’s time again for the annual trade union website league table. So how have the metrics changed in the last 12 months? (Previous results can be seen at 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013 and 2012). The league table doesn’t judge the quality of the website directly. Instead, it uses leading industry metrics to measure how many times the website is

If ten years ago you were asked what the next major trend in website design would be, not many people would have mentioned ‘responsive design’. With the iPhone yet to be launched and the iPad another three years away, people were still happily building websites that worked on a fixed size. It took quite a