Posts tagged "2012"

2019 update: LocalDirectgov and the underlying datasets have now been replaced. This means the tool was getting out of date and inaccurate, so I’ve switched it off. 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.

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.

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).