Category: government

Getting with the technology

I’m quite liking this – the Scottish Government are trying new things with technology, in this case, paying to put anti drink-driving adverts in billboards in X Box driving games.

Definitely an interesting way to get the message across, and I suppose it also doubles as a type of tourist advert, as it doesn’t say anything about the ads being restricted to players in Scotland only?

Either way, it bodes well for a Government to be as comfortable with using different media as this one looks to be! What next….

Oh no, wait…

Links to some documents from 2007 and 2006 on the old DTI site still work, so at least we can still access them (for now).

Links to some pages from 2006 and 2007 actually have a redirect…which is an advance.

Apart from the fact that the redirect takes me to a page that I’m ‘not authorised to view’

1. You are not authorized to view this page

You might not have permission to view this directory or page using the credentials you supplied.

If you believe you should be able to view this directory or page, please try to contact the Web site by using any e-mail address or phone number that may be listed on the Homepage(); www.dti.gov.uk home page.

You can click Search to look for information on the Internet.

2. HTTP Error 403 – Forbidden
Internet Explorer

I think it’s an advance, but I’m not altogether sure….although the fact that a redirect from a DTI page to a BERR page actually sends me to a DTI screen and advised me to go to http://www.dti.gov.uk, not http://www.berr.gov.uk makes my poor brain hurt.

DTI / BERR – I despair!!!

Ok, so as well as deciding to suddenly change departments / name with no notice (in itself enough to make me scream with frustration), those clever chaps and chapesses at the ex-DTI have gone one step further…and shifted most of the materials onto the new http://www.berr.gov.uk web address.

With no redirects.

Wonderful.

Here comes a good few weeks of altering every single damn link to their materials that we’ve ever posted to our current awareness service.

Even changing the ‘dti’ part of the web address to ‘berr’ doesn’t work.

They helpfully tell me this when I click on a link:

“The DTI web page or document you are looking for has not been found.

Administration

The DTI web page or document you are looking for has not been found.


We have restructured our website, and the information you are looking for has been moved, or you have clicked on an inaccurate link.

* If you are looking for a specific piece of information, you may find it easier to use the search engine or our Site Map.

* If you are looking for a particular document DTI has published, you can search our Reports & Publications site.

* If you still cannot find what you are looking for, call our Ministerial Correspondence Unit on 020 7215 5000 or email us.

Please update your bookmarks with the new URL.

“

Really? You think I should update my bookmarks? Why, what a splendid idea, I couldn’t have thought of it myself! And now, despite the fact that using it makes me weep with frustration, I’m meant to use your internal search engine to try and discover where you’ve put all those lovely, useful documents that we’d linked to because they were, well, lovely and useful!

*sigh*

Why must government websites do this?

Thanks to Binary Law, I now know that the DTI has become something unpronounceable, the DBERR. Is it ‘deeber’? ‘debeer’? ‘deberr’ (which allows me to say: to deberr is human, to forgive, debine?) Fingers crossed that they decide to be sensible about the whole process, and don’t just decide to shift the whole site, with no redirects, thereby rendering entirely useless the work of anybody who’s spend any time creating weblinks to any of their information…yup, that’d be me then!

Wonder if they’ll also fix the fact that their inbuilt websearch is the biggest excuse for a user enhancement I’ve ever seen, and has yet to ever actually work for me. Google and site specific searching is the only way I’ve been able to drag anything out of its depths!

And did I miss any prior notification of this? As of yesterday, their site was DTI, today it’s morphing (logo gone, I assume the new one’s coming), but no hint of todays change. Today, it’s their entire front page. Have I been selectively blind?

And now, I see the Department for Communities and Local Government is ‘redesigning’ too, apparently in response to ‘stakeholders’. Is the word ‘users’ actually banned in government circles? I don’t ‘stakehold’ their website, I ‘use’ it. And I wonder who the stakeholders were that they consulted…hopefully they’re not the usual, colour blind chimps with hugely advanced search skills they seem to base the rest of their redesigns on!