Posts tagged "Directgov"

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 I’m hoping I can resurrect some of these, but I suspect many are now too out of date.

Whenever there has been an extended gap in my blogging I try and find something to get it going again. It usually involves some kind of recap of the missing months to try and fill in the gap. This time is different only in the sheer amount of things that have happened. Over the last six months I’ve moved house, worked on (and launched) five major projects for CF Labs, begun work on three more and my employer has been abolished.

On Friday, the Government announced that it is intending to close up to 75% of the 820 public sector websites it has identified. The announcement coincided with a report from the Central Office of Information (COI) outlining statistics for central government websites. These figures show that 47 websites have cost taxpayers over £127 million in the last financial year.

If you dig a little deeper into the figures you can see that central government has spent £14m on Strategy & Planning, £15.8m on Design & Build, £23.8m on Hosting & Infrastructure and £9.7m on Testing (these are categories that COI requires under their TG128 standard). Despite their efforts (gathering this kind of data is by no means easy) I have concerns about the quality. For example:

It has been exactly nine months since I started my job at Consumer Focus Labs. In this time, we’ve published our Recalled Products website, some data on the Digital Switchover in Wales, been contributing to a blog following our attempts to get data out of Tesco and are producing our new StayPrivate website.

Sometimes I come away from the office and struggle to see what we have actually achieved. When you are stuck into day to day work, it is quite easy to lose sight of the bigger picture.