What
A fast, scalable, online
collaboration tool to help government
communicate and engage with the
public through websites and
blogs.
Built for agencies with
minimal technical knowledge — while still catering
for
advanced users wishing to customise, with
their own themes and plugin code they can
easily deploy — without procuring and managing
hosting.
Why
To replace a basic placeholder service website quickly, with clearer content, better accessibility and a stronger brand that could carry through print, digital marketing and service information.
Who
Department of Finance
Working in Australian Government Information Management Office on whole-of-government Information and Communications Technology, digital services and web standards. I worked with a small web-focused team, working my way up from apprentice to Whole of Government Software as a Service tech lead.
How
Architecture
Owned the technical architecture and roadmap for a high-traffic WordPress Multisite platform used across the Australian Government — spanning hosting, caching, deployment and extensibility decisions — keeping agency sites simple for non-technical publishers while still supporting advanced teams with their own themes and plugin code.
Branding
Govspace's branding needed to feel different from existing government services without losing authority or trust. I created both a full wordmark and a compact initials-based mark for smaller uses, then built the colour system around them.
Refusing to blend into the sea of navy blue existing government websites; a colour scheme of light and dark greys, contrasted with a highlight of bright orange and white was chosen. With sparing amounts of bright blue and green throughout, used as action colours for interactive media, such as the website.
Community
I worked with third-party maintainers to fast-track security and bug fixes affecting plugins used by the platform, including two publicly credited XSS patches.
Design
To remain simple while meeting the branding goal. A key focus was revising the content — particularly on key pages — to significantly improve readability and usability.
That included creating and reshaping public-facing content so the service proposition, platform benefits and onboarding path were clearer for government teams evaluating Govspace.
Development
Although based on an existing WordPress theme (to save time), there were many requirements that required custom coding from within a child theme; such as a custom homepage design and adding in featured image capabilities.
Hosting
Scalability was crucial for this service. Utilising layers of caching and redundancy I was able to ensure Govspace remained both reliable and responsive, even when under significant, unexpected load.
Imagery + Icons
Created featured-site imagery and a Govspace-styled icon library for blog posts and announcements.
Leadership
As technical lead, I worked across the full stack, guided other developers, reviewed implementation decisions, contributed to hiring, and kept technical and non-technical stakeholders aligned.
With
-
API -
Custom CSS -
Cypress -
GitLab -
Illustrator -
JavaScript -
Linux -
MySQL -
Nginx -
Photoshop -
PHP -
Sass -
Varnish / Vinyl Cache -
WordPress
Final product
Client feedback
We had the website live within six weeks — compared to a 3–6 month process with a digital agency.
I'd like to personally thank all the relevant staff at the Department of Finance for how diligently they ran and maintained the platform.
The platform helped transform how Australian government agencies looked at website development and costs.
In the media
…Govspace helped propel government web sites from a 20th century ‘brochure-ware’ approach to become more engaging and interactive.…