What’s new?
We’ve launched a new design for the Parliament website: www.parliament.uk
The redesign features a refined navigation system and improved information architecture, together with a new section called Topical Issues and greater emphasis on our Parliamentary News area.
The Topical Issues area organises parliamentary research material by subject, with the long-term aim to draw in other areas of parliamentary business like debates and Bills. News covers the main parliamentary business in the Chambers, Westminster Hall and Select Committee reports, inquiries and evidence sessions (read about the development of our News area)
Why?
The Parliament website aims to make parliamentary information more accessible, show that Parliament is relevant, and enable people to connect and engage with us.
The aim of the redesign is to: provide a site that is modern, fresh and engaging; refine the routes to information, making it more accessible for the user; and offer more focused, timely and dynamic content to improve the overall user experience.
Development and testing
The design and new information architecture has been developed by our team following extensive consultation across Parliament and external users, alongside a comprehensive programme of user and accessibility testing.
Plans for 2009
The launch will be a phased approach. The first phase is the new homepage and major landing pages, the Topical Issue section and new top level and service navigation across all content areas. The next stage of the roll-out, a redesign of all content pages, will follow throughout 2009.
Our five main areas of work for the Parliament website in 2009 are:
- buying tools to improve both search and content management on the website and intranet
- making changes to the look and structure of information on the website so that it’s more user friendly and information is easier to find
- making significant improvements to the intranet so that it will become an essential tool for Members and staff
- working with our ICT department (PICT) and others to ensure that all information generated by the work of both Houses, including Hansard, Bills and procedural information, is delivered effectively to the web
- working on a strategy that will enhance engagement between Parliament and the public through the use of social media and other tools.
As always, we’d welcome your feedback on this work. You can leave a comment below or email us through webmaster@parliament.uk
(You can see earlier iterations of our website in this welcome post)
13 comments
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8/04/2009 at 12:25 pm
IanVisits
Broken link:
http://services.parliament.uk/bills/2008-09/apprenticeshipsskillschildrenandlearning.html
When clicking on the navigation menu for “Mps, Lords and Offices”, it takes you to http://www.parliament.uk/mpslordsandoffices/ – which is a 404 missing page.
Also the breadcrumb navigation wraps in a rather unpleasant manner if the page title is too long.
A personal foible, the animated pink clock face reminds me more of the Financial Times than Big Ben – and if you are going to have an animated clock, I think it should be on a Clock Tower background.
8/04/2009 at 2:09 pm
Nic Gould
The new design looks good, congratulations.
A few comments:
- The clock: Maybe it’s just me but I can’t see what purpose it serves. I already havea clock on my PC and would rather not have a continuous running flash app duplicating this on every page of the site.
- The homepage at least, does not degrade well when viewing without javascript. The layout is disrupted and some text is unreadable.
- Topical issues are a great feature, it would be nice if you used microformats (http://microformats.org) to indicate subject tags (and also contact information). This is a very simple way of adding semantic value to your site (and is used in WordPress as visible on this blog).
8/04/2009 at 2:48 pm
paul canning
The redesign is great but it seems slow to load for me. OK once you’re in but homepage took 10′+. Maybe it’s just me …
8/04/2009 at 5:30 pm
IanVisits
I have also noticed that the homepage is very slow to load.
8/04/2009 at 10:34 pm
Stephen Hale
It looks great – congratulations.
9/04/2009 at 8:30 am
Alistair Reid
Hi,
Thanks for the comments so far…
@IanVisits thanks, we’ll fix that link today.
@IanVisits and @NicGould Re: The clock. We’re keeping the clock at the moment, but we’re taking off the moving second hand, also today.
Re: Homepage loading: We’ve improved how our content management tool outputs image file sizes for the homepage – so hopefully it should be loading faster.
Let us know any more feedback/issues.
9/04/2009 at 9:04 am
MJ Ray
I’ve just sent an email detailing the problems with the low-contrast colours and invalidity. I’m disappointed it wasn’t required to pass basic validation tests before launch.
9/04/2009 at 9:27 am
paul canning
yep, much faster
14/04/2009 at 5:02 pm
Diego Moore
Well I’m not too keen with the clock either. Is it just me or does it seem slightly chopped off at the top?
Overall I like the more modern look but the old site did appear to have had much more refined and balanced design.
I like how clean it is, the use of white space, larger font and use of colours. I don’t like the get involved icons (clip art?), location of the clock and lastly Find your MP really doesn’t look good on Safari 4!
Great work overall though…
21/04/2009 at 3:51 pm
Cameron Brown
Yes, the new website design looks very nice and rather user friendly.
However, some pages are a bit too “over-crowded” and there is too much information on the page, other than that the new design is a welcome.
Oh just one more thing, the Big Ben clock HAS to change, the whole new website is modern and sleek, however the clock just ruins it. CHANGE IT!!
Thank you
14/05/2009 at 4:39 pm
Nathan Massey
Are there any plans to implement the suggestions made by TheWorkForYou/MySociety in their ‘Free Our Bills’ proposals?
http://www.theyworkforyou.com/freeourbills/
15/05/2009 at 9:07 am
Nathan Massey
Also, it would be great if there were more video content on the front page.
On the top section of the homepage, on the ‘featured on the Parliament website’ section where you can switch between 4 different options to change the main image on the right of the screen, how about having that section change when Parliament is in session?
For example, you could have it so that when someone visits the homepage when Parliament are in session, you could have the main image switch to a flash video player showing the live video feed from Parliament (don’t auto-play the video though, make it like iPlayer where the video has a high-quality picture on the video player area, then when the user presses play, it switches the image for the video).
In the caption alongside the video player, you could have a link to a dedicated video page, with a large flash video player, again showing the live feed, but below the player, you could have some kind of live web forum/chat functionality so people can comment and chat about what is currently happening in Parliament in real time. You might also want to bring in and show a feed of Tweets from Twiiter with a specific hashtag (#parliamentuklive?).
15/03/2010 at 10:40 am
IanVisits » Analogue Clocks on Digital Websites
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