Inside GOV.UK
insidegovuk.blog.gov.uk · Company blog · on HN since 2014
The GOV.UK team writes about running the UK government's website, including web performance, accessibility, and content guidelines.
What HN saysHN commenters praise GOV.UK as clear, accessible, and well designed, and cite the blog's posts on removing jQuery and social sharing.
28HN people shared it
8linked it in comments
49stories submitted
849story points
2 years agolast shared
2014people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1The impact of removing jQuery on our web performance4 people · 322 points · first shared 2022 · 264 comments on HN
- 2GOV.UK social sharing buttons: the first 10 weeks3 people · 3 points · first shared 2014 · discussion on HN
- 3UK government changes website guidelines due to buggy screen readers2 people · 65 points · first shared 2016 · 63 comments on HN
- 4How and why we removed jQuery from Gov.uk2 people · 49 points · first shared 2022 · 43 comments on HN
- 5Gov.uk has a max sentence length of 25 words2 people · 20 points · first shared 2022 · 11 comments on HN
- 6What we’ve learned from one year of Real User Monitoring data on GOV.UK2 people · 6 points · first shared 2022 · discussion on HN
- 7Incident report GOV.UK: outage on 8 June 20212 people · 5 points · first shared 2021 · discussion on HN
- 8The findings of our first generative AI experiment: Gov.uk Chat2 people · 5 points · first shared 2024 · 1 comments on HN
- 9Upgrading to Universal Analytics2 people · 1 points · first shared 2015 · discussion on HN
- 10Homepage2 people · first shared 2017
- 11Updating Gov.uk’s crown1 people · 154 points · first shared 2024 · 180 comments on HN
- 12Opening up our code and logic for algorithmic decision-making1 people · 72 points · first shared 2022 · 12 comments on HN
- 13Increased error rate on Gov.uk on 5 January 20221 people · 57 points · first shared 2022 · 26 comments on HN
- 14Replacing the scroll tracker on GOV.UK1 people · 45 points · first shared 2022 · 39 comments on HN
- 15A bold new look for the Gov.uk homepage1 people · 5 points · first shared 2023 · discussion on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
one-more-minute · 2022-01-23
In general the gov.uk website is stellar. Lots of good info, and plenty of thought has gone into making everything clear, accessible and pleasing to the eye. Things generally work in a way that they really don't on most public org websites. The team behind it blog a fair bit about how they've made these things happen.
https://insidegovuk.blog.gov.uk
The only downside is that they often send you to sites run by other, significantly less competent bodies (looking at you, student loans company).
petepete · 2018-07-16
The gov.uk folks make heavy use of Markdown, and so they should - the sooner we leave this PDF/Word doc nonsense in the past the better.
HTML in the browser is the best tool for consuming documents; we can read and write on any device, bookmark documents or chapter headings, resize and style at will in a device independent manner, enhance documents and make them interactive[1], even add videos if required. The best part is that the source is all stored in plain text and is version controlled without requiring Sharepoint or similar.
[0] https://www.gov.uk/guidance/how-to-publish-on-gov-uk/markdown
[1] https://insidegovuk.blog.gov.uk/2013/08/21/barcharts-in-html-publicati…
joelanman · 2017-11-06
Can't think of where that particular finding is written up, but you can find a lot of our research and guidance on our blogs and site:
https://designnotes.blog.gov.uk/
https://insidegovuk.blog.gov.uk/
https://www.gov.uk/service-manual
franciscop · 2016-08-02
The UK Gov has done great work about this: https://insidegovuk.blog.gov.uk/2014/02/20/gov-uk-social-sharing-butto…
robin_reala · 2023-05-29
Incidentally, if you’re interested in the performance cost of jQuery, GOV.UK posted last year an analysis of the performance gain seen when they removed jQuery in favour of vanilla JS: https://insidegovuk.blog.gov.uk/2022/08/15/the-impact-of-removing-jque…
ClearAndPresent · 2022-08-16
The writers are Matt Hobbs and Andy Sellick, respectively Head of Frontend Development and Senior Frontend Developers at GDS. They may have considered alternative options.
Here's a previous article explaining why they did what they did:
https://insidegovuk.blog.gov.uk/2022/08/11/how-and-why-we-removed-jque…
xanthippos · 2022-08-16
However the page uses jQuery?
<script type='text/javascript' src='https://insidegovuk.blog.gov.uk/wp-includes/js/jquery/jquery.min.js?ve… id='jquery-core-js'></script>
designorant · 2015-11-06
To be fair, they are actually very transparent about their use of Google Analytics [1][2], and anonymise some of the data [3]. That is not too bad keeping in mind they share a huge chunk of that data with the public [4][5].
[1] https://www.blog.gov.uk/cookies/#googleanalytics
[2] https://insidegovuk.blog.gov.uk/2015/05/22/upgrading-to-universal-anal…
[3] https://assets.digital.cabinet-office.gov.uk/spotlight/javascripts/ana…
[4] https://www.gov.uk/performance/web-traffic
[5] https://www.gov.uk/performance/about