Cedyrn Creative is in hibernation
Dafydd Vaughan is currently working full time at the Government Digital Service building the new single website for government - GOV.UK and is not currently taking on new work. If your project is especially exciting feel free to email, but please don't be offended if I take a while to get back to you.
In addition to building websites for Cedyrn Creative, our director & main developer, Dafydd Vaughan, works on sites and services for CF Labs at Consumer Focus and the Government Digital Service.
Dafydd regularly writes for various blogs about this work so we've aggregated his most recent posts here.
Browser usage on GOV.UK
Earlier this year James Weiner and Ben Welby wrote about the browsers and devices that we are supporting on GOV.UK. We made these decisions using browser/device data from various sources including Directgov, BusinessLink, central government departments and several other big sites. Now that GOV.UK has been getting real traffic for a while, we are starting to [...]
Government Digital Service blog: 12 December 2012
Exploring local government services online
Back in February I wrote about how GOV.UK helps people get from a central government website to services provided in their local area. For each of these services, from paying council tax to reporting a dangerous building, we try and direct the user to the most useful place on their local council website. We do [...]
Dafydd Vaughan's blog: 14 November 2012
Hello GOV.UK
Last week we finally launched GOV.UK. On Tuesday afternoon I got to issue the pull request to remove all the beta messages from the site, then a team worked through the early hours of Wednesday morning to redirect as many Directgov and Business Link URLs to GOV.UK as possible*. On Wednesday, the site received over [...]
Dafydd Vaughan's blog: 22 October 2012
Working towards launch
As the launch of GOV.UK draws nearer, it would be a mistake to assume that the beta is in it’s final state. The development and content teams are continuing to make tweaks and changes to the site based on feedback and testing. This will continue both up to and after it becomes the official site [...]
Dafydd Vaughan's blog: 7 October 2012
Brushing off the cobwebs
Just over a year ago, I blogged that I was taking a break from CF Labs and joining a project to create a new website for government. Since then lots of things have happened, and many things have changed. Here is a quick summary: The Government Digital Service (GDS) was created to bring together many [...]
Dafydd Vaughan's blog: 29 September 2012
It’s not about cookies, it’s about privacy
The Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) (Amendment) Regulations 2011 which came into effect last year has presented UK website owners with a few challenges in moving to compliance. Those of us who work on public sector websites are no exception. We wrote about some of the ways we were working towards compliance here at [...]
Government Digital Service blog: 19 March 2012
Local services and GOV.UK
An important design rule of GOV.UK is to hide complexity, so if we are being truly user-centric, people should not need to understand the structure of government to be able to access services. Search data tells us that when people search for government services, they often don’t distinguish between central or local government. Every week, [...]
Government Digital Service blog: 14 February 2012
Cookies on the beta
The use of cookies on websites has become an increasingly hot topic over the past few months. A new EU law – specifically The Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) (Amendment) Regulations 2011 (PECR) – requires that websites ask for consent before setting cookies that aren’t “strictly necessary” for the operation of the website. We’ve [...]
Government Digital Service blog: 12 January 2012
Helping to build a single domain for government
Just under two and a half years ago I joined CF Labs – a new team based within Consumer Focus with a remit to build useful online tools and make data more useful and accessible. Over that time, we’ve worked to make product recall information more useful and helped to make it easier to reduce [...]
Dafydd Vaughan's blog: 5 September 2011
An update on the EU cookie law
“The law was meant to protect the privacy of people using the Internet. To accomplish this, the EU made over 90% of websites illegal” - Oliver Emberton, silktide. Back in May I wrote about the new EU law on cookies that came into effect this year and will be enforced from May 2012. On Monday, [...]
Dafydd Vaughan's blog: 27 July 2011