New GOV.UK website goes live (replacing Business Link)

Well, the new www.gov.uk website (which replaces the Business Link one) went live today.

They’ve gone for a much more minimal, stripped down look to help people find their way around the site better, but as a result lots of useful info has been removed. At this stage it’s not clear if this will ever be replaced.

 

You can read an interesting background to the new website here http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology…bsite-internet. There’s obviously a huge amount of work gone into it (a daunting task) but in the pursuit of simplicity, speed and ease of navigation there’s a risk that they’ve compromised on ‘usefulness’ by removing content.
 
In September last year, Mike Bracken (Executive Director of Government Digital Service at the Cabinet Office) Tweeted ‘Every superfluous page we create is one more dead end for an angry, frustrated, confused user’ but you could also argue that each page removed may now mean (at least) 1 less person finding the info they need.
 

If you’ve read anything about ‘The Longtail‘ and how Google and Amazon works then you can see how the new design may be a backward step for some.

I don’t envy the people behind this. They’re obviously some of the smartest people in web design/development, but I wonder if a company like Google would have done the same if they’d been given the brief? What do you think?

Related links:
Government Digital Service: Meeting the needs of businesses
Why GOV.UK matters: A platform for a digital Government

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