Gov.uk named THE BEST THING Britain has made all year

[NickFitz]

They are even tackling unemployment

https://www.gov.uk/jobsearch

Looks like C++ is booming....

https://jobsearch.direct.gov.uk/JobS...ndon&q=C%2B%2B

That's a good example of a case where the site that has the ultimate content is still outside: direct.gov.uk is the old "portal" from Mr Blair's era which is in the process of being supplanted.

[doodab]

That's a good example of a case where the site that has the ultimate content is still outside: direct.gov.uk is the old "portal" from Mr Blair's era which is in the process of being supplanted.

TBH I think the main issue here is that they are calling themselves gov.uk. To my and many other peoples mind that means anythingatall.gov.uk. So they are going to take the stick for everything else that isn't working.

[NickFitz]

TBH I think the main issue here is that they are calling themselves gov.uk. To my and many other peoples mind that means anythingatall.gov.uk. So they are going to take the stick for everything else that isn't working.

Eventually, everything will be under them. For example, go to http://fco.gov.uk/ and it will redirect you to https://www.gov.uk/government/organi...nwealth-office as of a few months ago. However it doesn't make sense to wait until everything can be moved in one fell swoop. That would be an unimaginably huge project, and those are what got government IT into such a state in the first place.

By starting small, they've been able to get a scalable infrastructure in place, and test it thoroughly on less important stuff. Now they've been able to take what they learned, and the tools they've developed along the way, and apply all that to bigger fish like the FCO.

Eventually everything will have been moved, but there's no point foregoing the benefits of making the new site and its improved facilities available as and when things are moved across rather than waiting several years for the big reveal.

The key point is, they've explicitly rejected the old ways of doing government IT, because they simply don't work.

[doodab]

The key point is, they've explicitly rejected the old ways of doing government IT, because they simply don't work.

Which is cool, but to many people the government is the government, so they are going to end up taking the blame for a lot of stuff that doesn't work which wasn't their fault or anything to do with them. Just an observation.

[NickFitz]

Which is cool, but to many people the government is the government, so they are going to end up taking the blame for a lot of stuff that doesn't work which wasn't their fault or anything to do with them. Just an observation.

They can handle it

[darmstadt]

The broken link isn't on their site, so there's not much point them using that.

Also, the site is written in Ruby on Rails, not Drupal

I don't know much about this new fangled technology but shurely:

Overview

data.gov.uk runs on a mix of Drupal and CKAN. To read more about the architecture see: Integrating CKAN and Drupal.

[Sysman]

FTFY

Ooh Ooh Ooh.

Where do I send my invoice too?

[vetran]

I don't know much about this new fangled technology but shurely:

That got me as well
the gov.uk is home brew Ruby on Rails.
data.gov.uk is on Drupal.

we have similar stuff where some expert won't use off the peg and writes their own. Then the off the peg moves forward with an upgrade and the home brew breaks completely at which point we panic because the guy who wrote the home brew stuff has retired.

Still think a broken link report is required.

[EternalOptimist]

I understand you banging the drum Nick, you have an interest. But you shouldn't tell the customer how great it is, you should ask him
and as a customer, I say it's crap


I have to start doing my paye on it soon, and Im blooming dreading it.

[DaveB]

It's exceptionally good because it completely eschews the frippery and excessive adornment that clutter so many sites, in favour of serving its primary purpose: to convey information as clearly and efficiently as possible.

As with so many things that appear simple and straightforward, this has only been achieved through an enormous amount of hard work by highly experienced designers, developers, user experience specialists, and not forgetting the infrastructure people that have put together a reliable platform for it to run on, and all at much less than most Government IT projects manage to spend on paper clips.

Obligatory disclosure: I know and, at other times and places, have worked with a number of people on the Gov UK team. They're some of the smartest, most talented, and most dedicated people I've ever had the pleasure of working with.

Which didn't stop them completely screwing up all the public info on Clients old web pages when they transferred it, rewriting chunks of it without asking and leaving us with a site we constantly have to apologise for when external users tell us how bad it is.