Gov.uk launches one UK government website to rule them all

The first major product of sweeping changes to how the UK government handles its internal IT systems and public-facing websites is to be unveiled on Feb 1, as a new unified website for online public services goes live for testing. A new single government domain, at www.gov.uk, will replace Directgov, the portal which launched in 2004, before extending across Whitehall departments’ sites in the coming weeks. The “simpler, clearer, faster” site has been designed with search engines and smartphones in mind. Early testing on 2,000 people by civil servants cut by a third the time it took people to find information or complete a task. In some cases, dozens of pages have been whittled down to a multiple-choice process to guide users to their particular destination.