The Insolvency Service transitions to gov uk
On the 13th of June 2014 our website transitioned to GOV.UK
On 13 June 2014 our website content transitioned to GOV.UK, the central location for government information and services.
Our new corporate page can be found at www.gov.uk/insolvency-service and our old site has now been redirected and switched off.
The GOV.UK website has been designed with users in mind by the Government Digital Service (GDS), so you may notice that much of our content has been rewritten as well as other significant changes.
Broadly speaking, the best way to navigate GOV.UK is to simply use the site search, however, to help familiarise our users with the new changes, a list has been compiled covering our main content that has been transitioned and where to find it.
In addition, any content which you cannot find on gov.uk may be located on the web archive of our old site http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20140311023846/http://bis.gov.uk/insolvency.
Content on the new website is driven by what evidence shows our specific user needs to be, or when publication is required via statute. Non-statutory guidance provided elsewhere by other organisations is no longer held on our site.
The site and its content will continue to develop over time and we welcome your feedback on what additional information you would like to see, or and any gaps left by the transition. Please contact us at web.admin@insolvency.gsi.gov.uk or use the feedback option at the bottom of each page.
Further information about the new site and transition
You will notice that the way GOV.UK delivers content is very different than before, for example we no longer have tabs for our business areas on our corporate page, and you can no longer browse around our content as you did before.
The reason for this is that GOV.UK is designed as a central, consistent point of contact between the public and government, and research has shown that people mostly come to government sites with very specific user needs.
The principle aim of the site, therefore, is to fulfil those needs as quickly, simply and clearly as possible with information and guidance broken in to three main types.
- Mainstream
- Corporate
- Specialist
Mainstream
Mainstream content pages (written and owned by the Government Digital Service (GDS)) are devoted to meeting the everyday needs of the general public, for example to answer questions like “I want to apply for a passport” or more relevant to us “I want to find out about bankruptcy” or “Complain about a limited company”. In the case of this ‘everyday’ information, research has shown that people are not likely to know where to look for it, and would generally start with a search engine like Google, so in the case of GOV.UK the relevant content is not directly linked to a government department but broken down into broad headings like ‘money and tax’. This is also why the search function on the GOV.UK homepage is ‘front and centre’.
Corporate
This is the ‘about us, who we are and what we do’ information and the basis of our corporate homepage. Here you will find:
- our press and news stories
- limited information about what we do, including our objectives
- our documents, including publications, statistics and consultations
- our corporate management
- contacts and corporate information, including our complaints procedure, media enquiries, corporate reports and transparency data.
Specialist
This content, written by us to strict GDS guidelines, is aimed at our specialist audience, for example insolvency professionals, advisors and engaged members of the public who want more detail than what is provided via ‘mainstream’.
What has changed and where are things now
The work of the transition to GOV.UK revolved around GDS identifying what our key user needs were by meeting with departments and analysing visitor information (i.e. number of ‘hits’ on individual pages on our old website) and then developing content to meet those needs.
This has resulted in some content being archived to the National Archives, and the content that remained being rewritten, or reviewed and edited to meet the GDS Style Guide. This work is ongoing.
At the top of our corporate homepage you will see a group of links for our main services and information. These provide links to our key mainstream and specialist content. We will monitor these to ensure that they remain useful to our various user groups.
What next
We will regularly take stock of the site as it is now and look for development opportunities. We would encourage our users to feed back any issues or common trends coming through that could be served with additional or revised content. We will be arranging for standard letters, guidance publications and other materials to be updated to reflect our new details and any additional information now required consequential to its non-transition from our old site (web address, forms/publication locations etc.) however, all the relevant content on our old site will be redirected so the above will remain functional.