Posts tagged "2012"

Back in February I wrote about how GOV.UK helps people get from a central government website to services provided in their local area. For each of these services, from paying council tax to reporting a dangerous building, we try and direct the user to the most useful place on their local council website.

Last week we finally launched GOV.UK.

On Tuesday afternoon I got to issue the pull request to remove all the beta messages from the site, then a team worked through the early hours of Wednesday morning to redirect as many Directgov and Business Link URLs to GOV.UK as possible¹.

On Wednesday, the site received over 1 million visits and regularly had over 10 thousand people using it at the same time. The teams at GDS monitored how the site was working, responded to feedback and made fixes where appropriate.

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.

Just over a year ago, I blogged that I was taking a break from CF Labs and joining a project to create a new website for government.

Since then lots of things have happened, and many things have changed. Here is a quick summary:

• The Government Digital Service (GDS) was created to bring together many bits of government that were working on similar things, including the project to create the new website
• We released a public beta of our proposed new website for citizens (to replace Directgov). We followed this with a beta of a platform to replace all central government websites and an alpha of our design principles
• I got involved in, wrote and talked about the use of cookies on websites and the new law that has caused a lot of fuss
• I got to go to Number 10
• I left Consumer Focus and joined GDS full time as a developer and tech lead
• I spent a huge amount of time travelling from South Wales to London and staying in hotels
• I eventually stopped this madness and relocated from Cardiff to a flat in East London
• We released the first batch of things for businesses on the public beta
• We announced the date on which GOV.UK will replace both Directgov and BusinessLink – the two biggest government websites.

Over the last year, this blog has been very much unloved and has gathered an unhealthy layer of dust. It’s not for want of trying – there are several half finished posts that I just haven’t gotten around to finishing. I’m hoping I can resurrect some of these, but I suspect many are now too out of date.