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

[Sysman]

Yep, your new portal into all things governmental has won a Design of the Year 2013 award, soundly beating the likes of Raspberry Pi, The Shard, Olympics et al.

To be honest it looks like something I wrote in raw HTML about 10 years ago.

Oops. More taxpayers' money down the drain?

[doodab]

t saw off last year's dazzling Olympic opening ceremony's cauldron of fire and London's 1,016-ft skyscraper The Shard - neither of which didn't even win their respective categories.

I don't think the reg can talk, grammar like that makes my ******* eyes bleed.

[NickFitz]

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.

[Bunk]

Hold on, are we saying that this is actually a successful government IT project?



What is the world coming to?

[doodab]

This bit looks interesting:

About - Technical Details | data.gov.uk

I'm guessing the big oursourcers had sweet **** all to do with this project?

[VectraMan]

It has larger fonts than most websites. You have to give them that.

[doodab]

This bit looks interesting:

About - Technical Details | data.gov.uk

I'm guessing the big oursourcers had sweet **** all to do with this project?

I'm a bit less excited now that I've tried it.

Average Earnings Index / December 2009 - Dataset - Resource - DGU

points to

http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/dcp19975_29746.xml

which is broken. Ho hum.

[vetran]

Its a bit cleaner but hardly a major step forward.

Comments on el reg & here suggest that multiple links are broken so they are failing to police links effectively which based on their design should be a daily activity. Also some suggestion that the accessibility side could do better.

Nice idea, mediocre implementation, using opensource though.

Savings ?? well at least it wasn't billions poured down the drain.

I'll take the Pi or the Shard.

[Sysman]

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.

Fair comment.

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.

<Cough>

Why does it tell me I need to upgrade my browser?

GOV.UK uses cookies to make the site simpler. Find out more about cookies

I was under the impression that sites had to ask for consent before using cookies. The above doesn't say that to me.

[NickFitz]

I'm guessing the big oursourcers had sweet **** all to do with this project?

Correct. It's a team that comes under the Cabinet Office, though they work in offices in High Holborn. A key idea was not to let the big consultancies get their hands on it, but instead to build a team within the Civil Service that could actually get stuff done. Lightweight, agile, and works; hence:

Hold on, are we saying that this is actually a successful government IT project?

Correct

I'm a bit less excited now that I've tried it.

Average Earnings Index / December 2009 - Dataset - Resource - DGU

points to

http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/dcp19975_29746.xml

which is broken. Ho hum.

There's an unbelievably huge amount of content and data that hasn't yet been brought across to gov.uk. This is an ongoing process, and one of the most important principles is that, when existing content such as a departmental site is brought across, there are correct redirects in place for every single piece of content, so that all old links will bring you to the new place.

One problem they can't solve is when a department whose site hasn't yet been moved breaks the old site. As you can see from that URL the link is to the existing ONS site at ons.gov.uk, and if whoever runs that site - probably one of the big consultancies - breaks a link without telling the Gov.UK team, they have to wait until somebody reports it to them. They can detect and fix 404s in their own logs, but not somebody else's.

So report the broken link: they have people to fix it, because they believe it's important to fix stuff like that