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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!

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