I have noscript

I see no button and no warning about the site being misleading.... :-)

Cookies

Yes, I did notice that. Actually I thought the modal 'closing this signals your acceptance to cookies' was rather a clever way of setting the policy to 'accept cookies or piss off'. Might use it on my site.

Modal warning

Signals acceptance that the site is a Beta, not that you accept cookies. A real-world cookie-acceptance message would need to be a lot less customer-intimidating

Re: Cookies

'closing this signals your acceptance to cookies'

You only see that if you have javascript enabled. No JS no popup.

@Chris 3

Unfortunately that isn't compliant with the EU directive, the audience still needs to be able to view the website without any cookies being dropped otherwise you are moving into Discrimination legislation. I'm pretty sure the ICO won't be happy if websites are holding people to ransom..."accept our cookies or piss off" is not the way to go.

I think the reason they have done it this way is that they desperately need the analytics for obvious reasons and unfortunately the analytics cookie is in the firing line as well, even if it is used for decent purposes.

Coincidentally

All the beta site's static content is delivered via Amazon's Cloudfront service.

Breaking it

What this new web site will do is to break links that other web sites have to directgov - they keep on doing this, it is a pain.

Does the budget cover converting all those pages?

No. And there's no CMS, so, if you are a government agency, you'll need to have the National Internet Service convert and maintain all your content for you.

No doubt there'll be a stylishly designed Change Request form

.. and the appropriate fees .. Any idea who will be lining their pockets with the conversion work?

I dunno, but did some user testing on new web based user registration service for a large government agency a week or two back - they can't add any extra help buttons because their third party contractor charges too much...

The holes are in the strategy

And that's not open to change

It's not as if you can do redirects is it?

I'm sure they'll redirect everything rather than giving you a 404.

OK, I'll bite

There's already a website that does this - Direct.gov. Problems with the new initiative are:

Outside talent has been drafted in to sweep away all the working UK gov websites, and centralise them in a new megasite. However, they don't have the domain knowledge that has accumulated within the agencies, and haven't done the groundwork. Once you dig, you uncover lots of tricky exceptions. There's no glamour in dealing with those, so we can then expect the superstars to tell the incumbents, 'OK, we've done the hard bit, the rest is up to you'.

The mega-platform is fully buzzword compliant but the transactional websites must interface with a variety of legacy back-ends. Often that means the new platform will need expensive bespoke middleware.

The mega-site approach was taken rather than one of developing toolkits, standards, and guidelines. So, agencies can't use their existing teams to make changes, but must request them from Web Central, with a consequent huge impact on time and costs. As the new platform has no CMS, this applies not only to functionality but to simple text changes.

The strategy is flawed as the megasite approach only works for the mass audience of undifferentiated customers. There are many communities who need to interact with Government and the same portal won't work for all. Imagine a home page that says -

- Looking for a job?

- Need a TV licence

- Want to buy a second-hand aircraft carrier?

- Can you decommission a nuclear power station?

Clearly, almost every agency still needs it's own website - as illustrated by the fact that the Government Digital Service hosts its own blog separately to their new beta.

So, all the supply-side shortcomings of Direct.gov replicated for a few incremental improvements on the demand side. This plus the second-coming of the megaplatform fiasco - the government tried before and spunked £35million on something called DotP (Delivering on the Promise) before quietly canning it. But some of us remember…

If there really is no CMS then, you're right, that is a problem. As for there being a lot of transactional websites, then that's a problem that I think most big organisations have and if the new website has to fall back to microsites to deal with them then that's a shame but a necessity - hopefully there are guidelines for how they should be integrated if there comes a time when a transactional website get updated.

At some point more transactions need to be done online - dealing with government workers in person or over the phone is a painful and slow process. If this is a step towards that then that's great.

Don't get me wrong, I don't think any new site is going to fix everything, but I'm also not in the doom and gloom camp (who, if they are bored, should find some more fodder at the new BBC Sport website).

Maybe it's a good start or maybe it will go nowhere. It's a beta, we don't know yet.

Cut out the high wastage levels of the past.

@AndrewCarr - Kudos for selflessly advocating using smaller outfits, rather than bigger players such as your employer.

@Number6

Yes, I'll be watching keenly for when they actually get around to adding their first transaction