Day 2 of GOV.UK – more iteration
Another day, another set of updates to GOV.UK:
1. Dafydd has updated the data set that feeds the deep links to services on local council websites. We had feedback on Get Satisfaction saying that the site wasn’t linking through to the right services on their local council pages. For example several people reported that the ‘what day is my bin collected’ page wasn’t redirecting accurately for them.
We are using a dataset from Local Directgov that is updated regularly and we are working with them to make sure we keep improving this. We’ll be blogging about this process in more detail soon.
2. Josh has been working on improving the handling of print stylesheets in response to feedback. If you need to print a guide from the site out we want to make reading that just as comfortable as it is on the screen. So we are stripping out stuff that you won’t need to see. We’ll be adding better print stylesheets throughout the rest of the site over the next few days.
Print stylesheets
3. Paul Battley has made the search function more robust for when it’s handling unexpected input.This was an encoding bug and so relatively simple to fix. Hat tip to Harry Metcalfe for spotting this.
4. Lisa Scott has simplifed the language in the Maternity Pay Entitlement tool to make it a bit more friendly.
5. Lisa also added more ‘find your local’ services, e.g. DVLA offices and Sure Start Centres
6. Calendars: As we blogged earlier we have updated the bank holidays section with Matthew Somerville’s code.
Please keep the feedback coming!
great stuff, especially trying to tighten up the links out to local government. I was delighted to see for once the links into islington council working ok.
the challenge for local government websites though is a simple business process one – they get so little traffic from directgov proportionately that there isn’t much incentive for them to keep links up to date. i suspect in some cases you may be better off dumping people in a google search for midfordshire broken street light
congratulations in particular on using getsatisfaction i toiled long and hard on using mutual transparent support when in central government but didn’t get very far see
http://talkaboutlocal.org.uk/mutualsupportforums/
next replace the benefits section with a souped up version of rightsnet forums
excellent work! impressively simple.
fyi: settings pop-up > anchor class=”close” > on focus in firefox 9
fyi2: check on iOS
fy3: check w3 validator (so close!!)
fyi4: @font-face would get rid of your Gill Sans ‘blinking’ issue, instead of creating it from js.
in terms of mobile site- what about jq mobile…? its widely supported, you’re already using jquery and html5.
and out of interest, why didn’t you use the html5 data attribute for your js functions?
congrats to all!
Why do you still not have any business content, or link to Businesslink or other gov sites (ukti, hmrc) for info? For example, search for ‘trading with India’, or ‘trading in animal products’.
Something that might be worth doing with your Print Style Sheets, is to embed a QR code at the bottom, so people can get back to the original source easily.
I know QR code take-up is ridiculously low, and that there are many other better ways emerging of providing similar contextual data. But my thoughts were purely on having something simple and easy to implement now, so that in the near future upon revisiting you can find a much better solution.
Saying that, I’m not sure I’d implement it. As I think it might just end up confusing a lot of customers.