What we’ve been working on since the last update, and what we plan to do next.
What we’ve done since 9 September
Running and supporting GOV.UK
To keep GOV.UK accurate, available and secure, and to meet the most pressing needs of end users, we’ve:
- redirected commonly misspelled vehicle tax URLs (eg www.gov.uk/vechicletax), which have caused over 100,000 404 errors in the last 3 months
- dealt with 210 content change requests, eg fixing broken links, removing forms from the student finance form finder, updates to the state pension campaign page and adding downtime messages
- published 68 new editions of content, including corporation tax, prepare annual accounts for a private limited company and getting an MOT
- completed the transition tribunal content from HM Courts and Tribunals Service, with the publication of Applying for a Gender Recognition Certificate
To meet the needs of the people who use the GOV.UK publishing tools, and our other colleagues across government, we’ve also:
- enabled GDS content designers to create short ('friendly') URLs without the need for developer input
- fixed a bug that stopped the Whitehall publishing application from rendering correctly in Internet Explorer 8
- corrected an issue that prevented admin editors from adding attachments to sections of Manuals
- started the transition of SaBRE
To keep our technology stable and up-to-date, and to improve our ability to support users in future, we’ve:
- started work on an API that will help to simplify our publishing workflow
- continued work on out-of-hours alerts to tell us when Bouncer, our GOV.UK redirector, is down
Improving GOV.UK
Things we’ve done to improve GOV.UK in relation to the missions on our development roadmap:
Mission: Intuitive tagging workflow - alpha
- continued work on prototypes of a new topic tagging interface
- continued building a new technical architecture for our content tagging system
Mission: Links to local government
- completed interviews with the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) and Camden Council on how they use the LocalDirectgov admin system
- identified the applications that use our current instance of MapIt so that we can migrate to our new MapIt server
Mission: 5 legacy site transitions
- published new mainstream planning appeals guides
Mission: Topic hierarchy for 1st theme
- preparing for our first detailed review of content and user needs around a particular theme, as part of our project to improve GOV.UK's information architecture; we're doing a dry run of the process and contacting organisations who'll be involved
Mission: 16 content themes improved by October
- discovery work on the student finance improvement theme, including a meeting with the Student Loans Company in Glasgow
- finished Corporation Tax improvement theme and published updated content
- continued improvement work on content for armed forces personnel
Things we plan to do next
In the coming 2 to 3 weeks we expect to:
- work with HMRC on changes to Inheritance Tax content, to support policy changes and the launch of a new service
- finish the transition of the MOD SaBRE microsite
- decommission the external link tracker now that it’s no longer needed
- de-duplicate some organisations in Feedex (the application we use to collect user feedback on GOV.UK)
- fix several calculator bugs, eg statutory sick pay and state pension top up
- add 2 new alert types to the MHRA Drug Device Alerts finder
- add more best practice examples to the content design manual
- make it clearer to publishers and users whether statistics are normal, national or ‘other’
- start improvement work on student finance content
- write content on how to challenge an election
- start planning for new, service-based content improvement themes
- run a workshop with the Disclosure and Barring Service to collaborate on finishing the DBS checker tool
- organise the second cross-government content conference
As always, if any of this is unclear, or if you have feedback on whether we’re prioritising the right stuff, please do comment on this post.
Jack Church provides Programme Support for GOV.UK. Keep in touch: subscribe to email alerts from this blog.
If this kind of work appeals to you, take a look at Working for GDS – we’re usually in search of talented people to come and join the team.
1 comment
Comment by Keith Seabridge posted on
Can you clarify what is meant by statistics that are normal, national or ‘other’?