The corporate digital team of the Welsh Government is planning to launch a new version of GOV.WALES website.
It has indicated that the move will take place “shortly”, with users being directed to a new home page, and involves adding news, statistics and research to the site.
According to a posting on the Wales Digital and Data Blog, the new version of GOV.WALES will include a series of changes, including a smarter search function, grouping related information into a series of ‘collections’, indications of whether information on a page is the most up-to-date, the removal of several banners, and more information published in HTML rather than PDF format.
The move to information in HTML is to be phased in, with testing to begin during the summer.
Tests and feedback
The changes have emerged from a programme of in-house testing and feedback from users on how they interact with the pages.
The blog says the priority has been to make sure the most frequently used pages are ready for when the new site goes live, and that there will be a period of months in which some older content will remain on the old site.
There has also been an effort to update the links on the most heavily used PDFs, such as the National Survey for Wales headline results and the Welsh Index of Multiple Deprivation. As the process will continue after the ‘go live’, it will take time to update the links on some of the older and less used documents.
Other plans include an effort to improve the way statistical reports are produced.
