Posts tagged ‘DirectGov’

365 days later

17 October 2013. 1 Comment

A year ago today two of the government’s biggest websites, Directgov and Business Link, were switched off and GOV.UK became the official site for information and services. The last 12 months have flown by. It’s interesting to see how much the site has changed over the year as it continues to develop. It’s now the […]

The internet is fragile

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 […]

Hello GOV.UK

22 October 2012

Last week we finally launched GOV.UK. On Tuesday afternoon I got to issue the pull request to remove all the beta messages from the site, then a team worked through the early hours of Wednesday morning to redirect as many Directgov and Business Link URLs to GOV.UK as possible*. On Wednesday, the site received over […]

Brushing off the cobwebs

29 September 2012

Just over a year ago, I blogged that I was taking a break from CF Labs and joining a project to create a new website for government. Since then lots of things have happened, and many things have changed.  Here is a quick summary: The Government Digital Service (GDS) was created to bring together many […]

Helping to build a single domain for government

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 […]

The last half of 2010 (Part 3 – December)

26 January 2011

This is the third and final part in a recap of everything that happened in the last half of 2010.  Part 1 covered the July, August and September including the launch of a redesigned CF Labs website.  The second part covered the launch of the new website for Consumer Focus and the second phase of […]

The last half of 2010 (Part 2 – October & November)

19 January 2011

This is the second part in a recap of everything that happened in the last half of 2010.  Part 1 covered July, August & September.  This part looks at October and November. October 2010 In October we completed the second phase of the new Consumer Focus website.  Earlier in the year we made the move […]

The last half of 2010 (Part 1 – July, August & September)

17 January 2011

Whenever there has been an extended gap in my blogging I try and find something to get it going again.  It usually involves some kind of recap of the missing months to try and fill in the gap.   This time is different only in the sheer amount of things that have happened.  Over the last […]

Costs of government websites

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 […]

Open Government & Open Data

15 December 2009. 1 Comment

It has been exactly nine months since I started my job at Consumer Focus Labs. In this time, we’ve published our Recalled Products website, some data on the Digital Switchover in Wales, been contributing to a blog following our attempts to get data out of Tesco and are producing our new StayPrivate.org website. Sometimes I […]