New look DWP website

Submitted by Daniel on Tue, 30/06/2009 - 11:55am

Those of you who haven't taken a look at the DWP website recently might want to have a quick browse. They've just relaunched it with a snazzy new interface.

First impressions are that it's got exactly the same content, with a prettier front-end and some at-a-glance homepages for advisers, researchers etc. The 'what we buy / welfare to work' section is identical. The major change, which has already been in place for some time, was moving the claimant-facing, Jobcentreplus.gov.uk content to the Directgov site. This is part of the government's agenda to bring everything public-facing under Directgov, with departments having their own corporate sites for non-customer facing information and services. Likewise, there's a long-term move to push everything business-facing towards Business Link, although that's got rather a long way to go.

Indus Delta won't be resting on its laurels this summer either, with planned adviser, provider, and policy zones on the site, and support for some proper, adviser-level community development in the sector. More details once we know them!

Comments

Submitted by Daniel on Fri, 03/07/2009 - 2:28pm.

The screenshot is reproduced under Crown copyright. Amusingly, the press releases appear to be broken at the time of writing. I wonder if they'll issue a press release about the new website when they've got them up again...

Submitted by ukbix on Fri, 17/07/2009 - 4:27pm.

Despite now having time to sort out teething problems, and no doubt (one would hope) having planned this upgrade for a considerable time, its amazing how the the vast majority of links to the DWP on other sites, search engines, forums etc now no longer work as they have moved the content, and in the majority of instances do not provide a link to the new content.

At a time when people are debating welfare reforms etc, this could be seen as either incompetance, or a deliberate attempt to block the finding of information.

Whatever the reason, it needs to be sorted out, and lessons should be learned - its not that hard for people who have no mental health problems, who do this for a living to update a site and not break the majority of old links.

I could understand a hobbyist making a mistake like this, or someone who is ill, but the DWP with their resources, and more importantly their duties and responsibilities?

Submitted by Daniel on Fri, 07/08/2009 - 2:18pm.

Breaking of links is a fairly standard issue on all government website updates. It's not a major issue on most non-government websites - fire and brimstone would rain from the skies if BBC News, Amazon, Wikipedia or the like broke all their links. I agree that it's a surprising thing to get wrong, as even the software I use allows one to gather all web addresses in a site and transfer them across to a new one. Interestingly enough, the software I use (Drupal) powers the new Directgov Innovate site.

There are also some issues around the lack of history in government websites - when a department rebrands or merges the sites are often updated within hours to expunge all traces of the previous identity. We have always been at war with Eurasia...