Experimental UK Gov site: alpha.gov.uk

Not the kind of error page that I would expect to see for a government website! <a href="http://www.alpha.gov.uk/fail" rel="nofollow">http://www.alpha.gov.uk/fail</a>

Incredible rethinking, atypical of big governments.<p>This, for the US, now. USA.gov works okay. It could really be better.

I really like this, and I'm excited about the fact this was apparently developed "in house" rather than by some speculative design firm.<p>Obviously it needs work, and a few design elements/features need tweaking - but it's a massive step in the right direction. Hopefully someone internally will see and understand how great this is and help it move forward.

Holy baloney. I'm just blown away, this is amazing. As a current state employee, I've seen the insane bureaucracy we have to battle just to redesign one internal site.<p>I would love to know how they did this. Are these contractors? Is it a seperate team? Is the redesign rolling out across all government departments? What is their CMS?<p>Oh man, I need details. If you were involved with this at all, please contact me...

Sounds like a great move. Looking forward to see what happens on there.<p>Again, I must say, this govt seems to actually be moving its ass and doing things (even if they're not always perfect). Impressive and completely unexpected.

I typed my question into the box, and I had the right information <i>instantly!</i><p>This is so much more efficient than any other government site I've ever interacted with, by many orders of magnitude.

That is absolutely the best government site I've ever seen. It looks like a person designed it, rather than one hundred committees.

I'd be interested to see what this would actually be able to make it from alpha to reality. I get the feeling that the dev team want to build some real use statistics and get as much feedback as possible in order to pressure their higher ups to allow them to do it for real. I hope they succeed.

It renders correctly in my customized firefox, unless many sites on the web nowadays. However, Google, WikiPedia and HackerNews render without problems too.<p>My settings are: Zoom Text Only, do not allow pages to choose their own fonts, Comic Sans MS for all fonts, minimum font size 20pt.

According to a tweet [1] from their technical lead, they're using Rails, Sinatra, Django and more. He says there should be a blog entry outlining the technologies soon.<p>[1] <a href="https://twitter.com/#!/jystewart" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/#!/jystewart</a>

Coalition governments are <i>brilliant</i>.<p>See also the Open Government License[1] - it might not seem much to Americans, but compared to Crown Copyright it is a revelation.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licence/" rel="nofollow">http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licen...</a>

This is actually pretty decent, its clean and usable which is enough of a surprised, but it looks like it might actually be useful as well. Geolocation was broken for me and @alphagov asked me for more information<p>Something feels strange about the govement asking me on twitter to give feedback on getsatisfaction

The X on the popup modal doesn't work when the site first loads.

Still, doesn't make up for hushing up the fact that police arrested people at random under Section 60 for things such as wearing zombie paint, protesting against the royalty, filming the police, on the 29th.

At first I was a bit meh, so what, especially as the welcome splash screen wouldn't close and required a screen refresh to get rid of it.<p>However, the blog's an interesting read on what they're trying accomplish. The point is to make the user's journey much better for common tasks (their example is a lost passport):<p><a href="http://blog.alpha.gov.uk/" rel="nofollow">http://blog.alpha.gov.uk/</a><p>Check out <a href="http://blog.alpha.gov.uk/blog/alpha-gov-uk-design-rules" rel="nofollow">http://blog.alpha.gov.uk/blog/alpha-gov-uk-design-rules</a> for example. They're openly ignoring IE6 and accessibility while they iterate interactivity, fairly brave for a government site.

"You pay. We decide."