

DWP - Services and benefits online - mattwritescode
http://dwp.gov.uk/eservice/need.asp

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Isofarro
This is a good reminder about how the "support popular browsers" approach of
web development is flawed. And how sites, and thus the code driving them, live
a lot longer than expected. This kind of technical debt accumulates, fixing it
involves rebuilding it (probably a clean slate approach, since there are
issues caused by the underlying Siebel baseline).

It's also a great comparison with the GDS Team's gov.uk initiative, the
difference in quality is distinctively noticeable. That quality is based, not
on the popular browsers of today, but based on the fundamental premise of the
web as an open and platform neutral environment. I guess, in 5, even 10 years,
this iteration of gov.uk will still be a reference example of a high quality
web development build.

I know a couple of the GDS Team behind the gov.uk project are regulars here.
To them, thanks for the amazing work, the attention to detail. I think this is
the first time where a UK government organisation/agency is leading web
development by example.

This is a great example of high quality web development being done at the
fraction of the budget given to high profile government IT project failures.
Certainly, smaller, agile, internal, passionate team of skilled individuals
outperforms the huge contracts to IT/Consulting companies.

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Stubbs
To be fair to the DWP, this is their old site.

One of the things the British Government is doing properly at the moment is
their digital strategy, their new web site gov.uk has won multiple awards.

If you go to the DWP's home page it does tell you it's an old site, and should
probably redirect, but it's unfair to criticise something that's not the
current implementation. Most of the links from that front page go to the new
gov.uk version, and I guess you'd have to work hard to find that error page if
it wasn't already bookmarked.

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ZeroGravitas
It doesn't redirect because this is the only way to apply online for
"Attendance Allowance (AA), Disability Living Allowance (DLA adult and child),
Overseas State Pension – if you are a non-UK resident (including Channel
Islands)".

You can download a PDF to mail in from the nice new site, but if you want to
do it online the new site will direct you back here.

(Not wanting to seem harsh, some things are being done well, but let's not get
carried away and forget all the many, many things that are still truly
dreadful and need fixed.)

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UVB-76
DWP are in the process of transitioning to their new gov.uk site. It's all
well and good criticising their old website, but what do you propose they do
about it? Transition to a new site? That's exactly what they're doing.

~~~
ZeroGravitas
I'm proposing that we don't pretend that this is an old, unused site that
someone has stumbled across because goverment IT is doing such a good job not
breaking old hyperlinks.

It's still in active use and it's still terrible. Those are simple facts that
doing the relatively easy job of moving a bunch of PDFs and static web content
to a new site are not going to change.

Government IT (in the UK and elsewhere) has been, and still is, totally fucked
up. Let's not hide from that fact because it's only by publicizing the sorry
state that it's in that things like alpha.gov.uk can get any traction compared
with the traditional way of doing things. But even that's low-hanging fruit
compared with the regular billion pound disasters that government IT
procurement regularly delivers.

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UVB-76
Nobody is pretending anything. It's the old DWP website. The DWP has a new
home on gov.uk, which is much better, and is transitioning — actually rather
quickly, given all the red tape that must be involved — to this new site as we
speak.

The old website only persists because a few remaining functions have not been
transitioned yet. It's rubbish, but it's actively being replaced. Criticising
it is pointless.

It's interesting that you refer to alpha.gov.uk. The gov.uk site left the
alpha stage and officially launched in October 2012, and as much as government
IT projects are usually a disaster, you can't deny gov.uk is a major step in
the right direction.

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ZeroGravitas
Have you got any evidence that it's actively being replaced?

All the most popular links on gov.uk take me to a very nice landing page with
an overview, but if I actually want to do something they all link out to the
existing web apps. Some of which I've used and are not terrible, but not
likely to win many design awards either.

It's great that the UK government is no longer consistently failing at the
simple task of putting information online, but anything past the 20th century
web still seems beyond them. Hopefully it's the next step, I don't really envy
the people that need to make that cultural change happen. I do however feel
it's more likely to happen sooner if we don't pretend that it'll just happen
magically by itself.

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anu_gupta
Well, the GDS team are pretty open and transparent. Why not go take a look a
their blog where they go into quite a lot of detail about their plans?

~~~
ZeroGravitas
I did look actually, the stuff I found all had a strong "content" focus. Which
is the obvious place to start but as they say themselves, reflecting on
getting every ministerial dept on board and their first six months: "it’s
barely the end of the beginning".

I did spot a mock-up of a form for reporting lost Passports, which when I
googled for it was a nice 3 question form which after processing your answers
used that information to give you a link to the correct PDF form to fill in
and post (ok, to be fair it gave some helpful extra contextual info like the
relevant countries embassy info, but to be unfair if you ask it about an Adult
passport, then want to know about a child passport--because I'd imagine losing
your whole families passports at once is relatively common--it forces you to
answer the remaining 3/4 questions again).

So, some little steps in the right direction as far as web _apps_ for
interacting with government are concerned.

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EwanToo
The front page of <http://dwp.gov.uk/> says in pretty big writing "We have
moved to www.gov.uk/dwp"

Which is a much nicer site:

[https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/department-
for-w...](https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/department-for-work-
pensions)

Of course, they could break every link out there to their old site if they
wanted, but instead they're implementing redirects for all the high-traffic
pages.

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thomseddon
At the other end of the spectrum, the Manchester city council site:
<http://www.manchester.gov.uk/>

Definitely not what you might expect!

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andyhmltn
Wow! That's the best looking government run site I've seen

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liotier
Beautiful - though navigation suffers a bit from the lack of hierarchy.

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timack
I like the way they apologise in advance to those with accessibility issues.
That's a nice touch.

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ZeroGravitas
Looks like Siebel (now Oracle owned)

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siebel_Systems>

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jiggy2011
Not sure about this specifically, but the DWP use Siebel extensively all over
the place.

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niteshade
Why is everyone ready to kissarse the Gov's new website? Its still is an utter
pile of shit, they've only cleaned up a bunch of pages, all the main stuff is
still stuck in the old ugly website.

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XarotheOne
That is grim.

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sneak
BREAKING: Government bureaucrats fiendishly bad at IT. Film at 11.

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anu_gupta
Nice throwaway comment written without actually having much of a clue about
what the UK Government is doing with its web presence.

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sneak
My comment could also be paraphrased as "Why was this link submitted to HN?"

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anu_gupta
No, it couldn't. if that was your intent, flag the submission.

Or set aside your bias and take a look at what the GDS team is doing.

