Time was (last millennium) when every new government department / agency website was newsworthy whatever its utility. Then lots of content was added and content management systems were employed to structure browsing and search. That was all good stuff but with plenty of room for improvement. Many are now repainting their frontages and making those improvements. Unfortunately such improvements often involve not only moving the furniture about but also reshuffling the filing cabinets without much thought to how this affects their established “customers”.

IMPACT points to criticisms on IPKAT of the new Patent Office and Information Commissioner’s websites. One of the main beefs is that they have moved/removed pages thus thoroughly confusing established users and breaking thousands of useful deep links into their sites.

Users comment:

I find it incomprehensible why all previous links to pages have now changed.

[we] are left with broken links all over the place and no systematic way of referencing documents.

Meanwhile over on the Parliament site they are taking it one step at a time. Thus far “a more professional, modern design applied to the homepage and some top-level pages and a simplified navigational structure.” Thankfully, at present most of the underlying pages remain as before.