WRITTEN ON January 25th, 2007 BY William Heath AND STORED IN Uncategorized

A note from Tom fans my smouldering concern about government web policy. My own simple views are that open.gov.uk was great, that editorialising, spin and changing the names of your web site are bad, and that DirectionlessGov beats DirectGov hands down for what I want. On money, if there are low-cost quick wins I think the taxpyer is owed them every time.

I see Alan Mather has written about the DirectGov upgrade

Anyway, good luck to the new platform for direct.gov.uk. You’ve spent 30 months creating a site that is the same as the old one; I’m looking forward to seeing what new things can be done with the new service that couldn’t be done with the old one.

He asserts that embedded links are inaccessible and hard to maintain when links break and describes how he criticised and swore at the developers (how they must miss him). Alan’s takeaway lessons are

Always be clear about your requirements lest they be misunderstood, and When you’re right, you’re right, even when no-one agrees with you

There’s a different lesson: When you’re wrong you’re wrong even if you think you’re right.

Tom draws two rather different lessons from Alan’s account:

1. Employ web developers who understand the difference between a nice and a hideous URL structure.

2. The way to handle breaking links is to do everything you can to make sure that links on government web pages don’t break!

I’ve also seen the issue raised about what precautions are being taken so that the 500 govt sites they were killing would all offer redirects to the new mega sites that were taking over the responsibilities.

Sam meanwhile has corrected DirectionlessGov to pick up the new DirectGov feeds. But when he tests them on the word “goat” we still find taxpayers have paid for a multi£m gag generator.