As the launch of GOV.UK draws nearer, it would be a mistake to assume that the beta is in it’s final state. The development and content teams are continuing to make tweaks and changes to the site based on feedback and testing. This will continue both up to and after it becomes the official site for government services on 17 October.
This past week, we’ve released (and written about) the new homepage design, updated browse categories and the removal of the search ‘auto suggest‘ feature. In addition, we’ve also made a few other, smaller & slightly less noticeable, changes to the site.
Where possible, I’m going to be writing about them and posting them either here or on the GDS dev blog.
The first of these, about the changes we’ve made to guides and 302 redirects has just been published:
The guides format on GOV.UK is generally used for longer, more in-depth content (example). It usually consists of two or more ‘parts’ spread over multiple pages, each of which has its own URL. Until recently, when you visited gov.uk/any-guide, we automatically redirected you (using a 302 redirect) to the URL for the first part, e.g. gov.uk/any-guide/part-1. This meant that if you bookmarked a guide, you’d usually bookmark the first part.