14 February 2018
In its early days, GDS published a set of design principles to guide the building of new digital services. These principles were a codified version of a set of practices that had developed during the building of Alphagov and the beta of GOV.UK. The 10th principle says: Make things open: it makes things better Teams […]
28 January 2013. 2 Comments
At some point in the last few weeks a lot of the things I worked on back in Consumer Focus disappeared from the internet. The sites were turned off and the URLs redirected to the organisation homepage. There is no explanation or notice explaining why you end up on that homepage and you would be […]
14 November 2012
Back in February I wrote about how GOV.UK helps people get from a central government website to services provided in their local area. For each of these services, from paying council tax to reporting a dangerous building, we try and direct the user to the most useful place on their local council website. We do […]
12 January 2012
Today I’ve written about how we will be using cookies on the gov.uk beta website. An extract is below, and you can read the full entry on the Government Digital Service blog. The use of cookies on websites has become an increasingly hot topic over the past few months. A new EU law – specifically […]
5 September 2011. 3 Comments
Just under two and a half years ago I joined CF Labs – a new team based within Consumer Focus with a remit to build useful online tools and make data more useful and accessible. Over that time, we’ve worked to make product recall information more useful and helped to make it easier to reduce […]
27 July 2011
“The law was meant to protect the privacy of people using the Internet. To accomplish this, the EU made over 90% of websites illegal” – Oliver Emberton, silktide. Back in May I wrote about the new EU law on cookies that came into effect this year and will be enforced from May 2012. On Monday, […]
24 May 2011. 2 Comments
Later this week a new law comes into effect – the Privacy & Electronic Communications (EC Directive) (Amendment) Regulations 2011. This law requires all website operators in the EU to gain consent from visitors before storing or retrieving information from a visitors computer. Essentially, this law blocks the use of cookies until a user has […]
28 June 2010
On Friday, the Government announced that it is intending to close up to 75% of the 820 public sector websites it has identified. The announcement coincided with a report from the Central Office of Information (COI) outlining statistics for central government websites. These figures show that 47 websites have cost taxpayers over £127 million in […]
13 June 2010
On Thursday, CF Labs launched their latest project – StayPrivate.org – into public beta. This site is designed to make it easier to sign up for the various marketing opt-out services that exist in the UK. There are lots of different opt-out services that exist, all of which have separate sign-up forms and require you […]
24 May 2010
We are nearly two weeks into the new Conservative-Liberal Democrat and there seems to be a lot of work going on behind the scenes to prepare for the start of the new legislative programme tomorrow (Tuesday). Of course, with a new government brings a new direction. Steph Gray, a former civil servant working in the […]