In January 2015 we launched this Beta website called Visual.ONS – designed to help us learn how better to tell stories from our statistics to a broad audience.

Three years and more than 200 stories later we’re ready to take off the training wheels. At the end of March we’ll be moving our existing content to, and publishing all future content on, the main ONS website. We’ll then close this website but will make sure all the stories we’ve ever created will continue to work, even if you click on an old link.

While the Visual site itself will close, we’ll continue to produce the same engaging content but it will be published on the ONS site alongside our statistical bulletins and expert analysis.

In case you were wondering about the most popular stories on the Visual site since launch, they are truly matters of life and death – helping people understand how long their pension will need to last in the context of a society living ever longer and  the causes of our death.

Almost 2.5 million people have read Visual articles on the site since launch. But it’s worth noting that fewer than 1 in 5 visitors to Visual come directly – the rest of the traffic comes from Google searches, from social media or links from 3rd party websites.

In fact, more than 6 million people have consumed the maps, tools, interactives and graphics created for Visual because they’ve been embedded on the websites of publishers such as Guardian, the BBC, the Daily Telegraph, the Daily Mail, Business Insider and many others.

As part of the migration we’ll be making some design changes to parts of the ONS website to better showcase this type of content. But other than that it’s business as usual.

And that’s the most important fact to focus on – creating brilliant content that broadens understanding of the value of our stats to help people make better decisions has become business as usual in the ONS.

That’s a pretty good conclusion to our Beta.