What’s in GOV.UK’s rear-view and what’s on the horizon this week.
What we’ve done recently
In the past couple of weeks, we have:
- launched the register to vote service on GOV.UK
- upgraded featuring on homepages, topic and worldwide pages - you can now feature blogposts, services and more
- simplified metadata fields across Departments and Policy
- finished the minimum viable product (MVP) of the new manuals format
- surfaced search ‘best bets’ to users
- built a nice index page for government blogs and made blogposts look nicer on mobile
- improved the appearance of organisation homepages for high-profile groups like UKVI
- moved Foreign and Commonweath Office (FCO) payment services from www.gov.uk to service.gov.uk, so that in the future the digital team at the FCO will be able to maintain and develop them
- finished the second round of spot checks of departmental content
- released a way of distinguishing between preview and production environments on the publishing tool used by GDS content designers to get feedback
We also bidded (or should that be bade? we don’t really know any more) a very fond farewell to Sarah Richards, Head of Content Design at GDS . The post is currently being covered by Padma Gillen while it’s being recruited. And Sarah’s still giving awesome content advice on her blog.
What we’re doing now
In the next week or so, we’ll be:
- designing a more user-friendly government organisations page
- improving the way we present government roles with no postholder in them
- finding better ways of editing smart answers and setting up short URLs
- considering how to improve start pages
- tagging ‘services and information’ content (mainstream) to departments and agencies, so these items appear when the organisations filter is used
- working on a way of warning editors when they’re about to publish something with broken links
- testing early ideas about how third party publishing might work to support transition of HMRC Manuals
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4 comments
Comment by Andrew Robertson posted on
Hi, could you briefly explain what "surfaced search ‘best bets’ to users" is?
Any other tips or feedback on what organisations can do to help improve search would be good: we're getting anonymous feedback that search isn't good but few specifics to follow up. Perhaps a separate blog post as I hear there's other work on search going on or planned? Thanks
Comment by Andrew Robertson posted on
I've seen the post "How GOV.UK site search works" published today, covering what I asked: https://insidegovuk.blog.gov.uk/2014/06/13/how-gov-uk-site-search-works/
Look forward to hearing about new plans and improvements!
Comment by Graham Francis posted on
Nothing if not responsive, that's us...
Comment by Paula Harrington posted on
It's definitely still 'bade'. But you could just say 'said' and avoid the problem!