Defra and BIS websites: before and after
Defra and BIS quietly rolled out new corporate sites today.
And they’re both vast improvements on the old ones – which were bland, text heavy and barely navigable in comparison as these ‘before’ screenshots show:
Although to be fair, that’s the Defra homepage from 2001 and the DTI homepage in 1997 and at the time I’m sure they were pretty cutting edge. Since then, both sites have evolved along with the medium itself and today’s relaunches are just the latest of many gradual improvements.
BIS interim site refresh
For BIS, today’s update moves us forward from the interim website we put up rapidly and at minimal cost straight after the merger of BERR and DIUS. The aim was to improve the design, add useful content about BIS’s mission, ministers and structure, make it easier for our audiences to find policy info, publications and priority programmes.
We also added some behind-the-scenes trickery, courtesy of Steph, to offer news and speeches in ways that make sure they are as readable as poss by humans and machines alike; and to capture any dodgy URLs constructed from old BERR and DIUS ones and redirect them to the right place. I’d best leave it to him to tell you about how that all works.
In summary, this refresh takes us one step closer towards the unified, user-focused website which we’re working on at full pelt to be completed by March 2010. (It had better be, having now announced the date on the site itself!)
But of course, that will be just another step in the evolutionary process. Time will tell which features will be fit enough to survive another ten years.
Defra site relaunch
For Defra, today saw a bigger relaunch. I can’t claim any access to the back story, but as a casual observer these things leapt out at me:
- It’s *much* cleaner and prettier – great use of colours, right down to greying out the partner site logos so they don’t distract the eye from the Defra content (without losing their prominence either – a clever bit of light touch design).
- The navigation has been simplified and streamlined, from a long list of options to just six primary tabs. This gives an instant overview of Defra’s remit and will no doubt help users see at a glance which bit of the site’s for them.
- Some of the more successful features of the old site have been preserved – the well-maintained A-Z is a case in point. It’s something we’ll be including in the final BIS site in March and we’re pretty excited about the way we’re going to do it. I’ll be writing more about that soon.
- The distinction between popular and recommended pages on the homepage is a neat way to balance the audience and organisation goals: the stuff they want to push, and the stuff people most frequently want to find.
- Tidy, information rich section landing pages with clearly labeled boxes to aid fast navigation.
- And from reading the launch announcement, it’s clear that this is all based firmly on user centred design principles.
So as I put this blog post to bed I hope the Defra team is still out enjoying a well earned drink.
If you’ve any thoughts on the BIS site in particular, the team and I would love to hear them. Or if you’re in the mood for looking at some more old homepages see this from the Telegraph: How twenty popular websites looked when they launched.
Update: Julia’s reflected on this too at http://juliac2.wordpress.com/2009/09/17/two-government-websites-get-a-refresh/
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Comments
I like the site design a lot – real achievement to get so much in without it feeling crowded or oppressive.
I am getting a couple of glitches looking at the home page with FF 3.5.3 on 1280×1024 display. Just in case my setup is odd enough for this not to have been spotted (but these are not problems I generally see):
– the contact tab in the row at the top breaks into a second row
– the text in the two third-width boxes towards the top of the page and the three third-width boxes towards the top of the page bleeds through the bottom edge
Both those problems disappear if I set site zoom to 100% and text zoom to 80% using NoSquint.
I think their are some major improvements especially the top one it is much easier on the eyes than before 
Hello, I'm Neil Williams. I'm a government web geek, a dad, a husband, a grower of veg, a keeper of hens and a lapsed comedy writer, roughly in that order. 
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