SDD Website Redevelopment

The Statistics for Development Division conducted a User Focus Survey in 2017 (here is a summary of the User Focus Survey, and an article with background information). As a result of this survey, and working closely with Statistics New Zealand and a consulting company called Maven in Wellington, we reviewed the SDD, PRISM and other associated websites in order to better meet the needs of users. All users will be glad to know that we are in the process of developing a new site which we hope to have available for testing by the middle of 2019. You can follow the progress of the development via this page.

One of the key differences users will notice is that we are moving away from a website which is structured as Demographers and Statisticians “think” to instead be structured as users think. That means it will revolve around themes and key words such as population, energy, trade, births and deaths rather than census, HIES, CRVS which don’t necessarily mean anything to users. We will also structure data by Country, so for example the Kiribati page will have the most recent reports for Census, HIES, DHS, a link to the Kiribati PopGIS, the Kiribati NSO website and anything else related to Kiribati. There will also be a powerful search engine which will easily enable users to search through all articles and databases.

Another key feature is that the new website will be dynamic – all documents will be stored in a document library, all statistical data in a database and all other datasets in the Pacific Data Hub. There will only ever be one copy of a document or dataset, and all changes only take place once, rather than in multiple locations. The site should be much cleaner, and easier to update than the current site.