Sonet Journal

About a year ago we were working on a Government contract to deliver an accessible website and maintain the site with the view to building a larger and more up-to-date content management system (CMS) for the website in the near future. Six months into the contract and I was having a lunch with the burser who informed me he felt that the government would possibly be looking to close the site down and a few others in the future, he was not really sure if this would happen but indications told him it may be expected.

Reading the BBC news this morning and came across this article Government to close 551 websites caught my attention and there it was, the prediction appeared to be ringing true. Yes, the UK Govt does intend to close a lot of it’s websites and steamline through two central websites. The belief is that visitors prefer to find information quickly rather than surfing through various sites and links to find it.

While broadly speaking we are in agreement with this, and yes it is a good news as it shows that the Govt. are definitely evolving and listening to feedback online, it does leave the question open to doing business with the government. Who now is favoured to get the contracts to maintain and build these Govt. supersites? Before now departments and agencies were free to choose who they wanted building their sites as long as the web development company met the criterion to tender. This had it’s benefits, as smaller or medium sized companies were considered for choice government work. Now it would appear that the contracts may go to much larger corporate firms to build these projects. When this happens they usually tend to farm the work out at a ridicously low price to the small to mid-sized firms.

Identity & Individuality Questions

Another issue may arise about the loss of data and individuality. A lot of smaller government websites are clearly a labour of love and reflect years of effort to get the right design and information up for it’s visitors. Will this now be lost? By moving to supersites will we see a watered down version of information from these independent government websites, will the identity of these sites be affected?

I’ll draw a parallel here with what Best Western did to some of the sites under their control. So eager were they to implement their branding on other hotels that any hotel under their jurisdiction had to change their site to a Best Western styled site. A good example is the Red Lion in Salisbury a beautiful hotel with a long history, their site had to come down and be replaced with the Best Western brand. I believe the term is called steam-rolling.

Hoepfully whoever takes charge of the transition of these sites to the new supersites comes up with an architecture that allows for a certain amount of autonomy in the upkeep of these sites.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 10th, 2007 at 9:12 pm and is filed under Discussion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.