> Dear Dr Bulger
>
Thank you for your feedback. There are a couple of resources which you may  find useful when looking for content on the website, the search engine  facility, within Policy and Guidance there is an A-Z guide, the sitemap has an A-Z directory and provides a guide to where content on the site is posted. NSF:
http://www.dh.gov.uk/PolicyAndGuidance/HealthAndSocialCareTopics/OlderPeoplesServices/fs/en

 Search engines such as Google and AltaVista use a process called spidering  to capture links to external websites across the Internet. These are not  done everyday but are done regularly. The search engine companies will not  publish the frequency with which they spider the Internet, however, so I
 can not tell you when the next one will be. As soon as the search engines  spider the new DH website, the search results will return links to the new  site. The problem you have identified should, therefore, only be  short-lived. In the meantime, we have implemented redirects for all
 www.doh.gov.uk urls which will either take users to the new Homepage or to  a specific section homepage such as 'Publications'.

 In response to your general point about the website having changed, I'd  like to share with you some of the thinking behind the changes we have  made.

The Department of Health (DH) website has been redesigned and has a new
web address www.dh.gov.uk. This is because DH has moved its website onto
 'DotP', the central government content management platform. 'DotP' was  developed by the Office of the e-Envoy to meet government standards on  accessibility and targets for electronic service delivery. In the process  of re-designing the website, content has been completely re-organised
along  thematic lines and some content that was deemed inappropriate or out-of-date was culled. This was done in response to feedback gathered
from extensive user research we undertook between 2000 and 2002.

The 'DotP' system itself automatically generates URLs for each new piece of content created. In the migration process, each piece of content that wasmoved across from the old website was assigned a new URL according to its location within the new website structure. The old URLs would not have
been retained even if we had kept the doh prefix.
>
 Setting up a re-direct for each of the approximately 70,000 pages that
were moved would not only have been a huge task but would also significantly
affect the new website's performance. It would also be misleading since
content on the new website is not always identical to that at the old URL.
Some pages will have been merged and others split up.

 Links to bookmarked pages or previously published URLs will not be broken.
 Users will be re-directed to the new website. Re-directs have been set up
 for key areas of the site. In all other cases, if a doh-based URL is used,
 users will be re-directed to the homepage of the new site. URLs for all
 Domino databases except Press releases, COIN and POINT will remain the
 same. We believe that the improved structure, navigation and search
 functionality mean that user disruption will be minimised.

 The Department of Health reserves the right to move or change its website
 URLs at any time in order to meet changing business needs and to
 continually improve its online service. External websites are, of course,
 permitted to link to the DH website but do so at their own risk. We do not
 encourage deep linking but recommend linking to section homepages, which
 are less likely to move or change.

 I hope this clarifies the situation. I can only apologise for the  inconvenience this may caused you.

 Department of Health
Communications Technologies Team
 

My Reply 8/3/2004

Thank you for your comprehensive reply.

I understand the need to update the DOH web site. The new web may be better
than the old, although the rather long urls that it produces for such things as NSFs are
not exactly car-park friendly...you could hardly tell anyone form memory to
look at
http://www.dh.gov.uk/PolicyAndGuidance/HealthAndSocialCareTopics/OlderPeoplesServices/fs/en
which you sent me.  But that site does not list all the NSFs, just the one
for older people. All NSFs were easily found before on www.doh.gov.uk/nsf
Neat and easy. Searching does not quickly (I gave up trying) find that page
which I am sure still exists somewhere in there (perhaps not, see late
thought bottom of page)

It is not accepted practice to kill off  urls overnight. No commercial
organisation would contemplate it.  "Old urls should never die"  a phrase I
take from http://www.ioe.ac.uk/brian/maict/siteDesign.htm

I agree you could not have mapped 70,000 pages and would have been
pointless.  We will have to find the new urls and Google will one day catch
up.  I accept that could not have kept the old URLs or simply kept the old
url without the o, since you are using an automated url generation system.

You could, indeed should, have redirected the 100 or 200 most popular areas
on your old site to new URLS. (To have been comprehensive you could have mapped each index.htm on your old site!)

The method do this could have take a secretary a day to make up the 100 or
so redirections pages, replacing the old doh pages with a simple page, so
when users typed in http://www.doh.gov.uk/nsf a page would come up stating:
"Please note the pages will now be at http://www.dh.gov/uk/whatever  Please
amend your references for future use" You will now be redirected to the new
site" After 6 months or a year you kill off the old doh site.

It just takes less than a line of code to do this.  In my view there was no
excuse for not providing this. Overconfidence in the new search engine made have deluded you into thinking you did not need to make up the 100 or so redirection pages on your old url
that you may have needed in order to redirect the bulk of the traffic.

Very irritating and I hope e-Gov have learnt a lesson about this fiasco.  I
am not alone. There were a lot of angry PCT people, let alone G.P.s out there last month.
From Institute of Education site
 

"Archival URLs
URLs should never die so:

 Provide a rerouter page for URLs which you have to change -- thier
lifetime should be at last 6 months, preferable for ever.
 The code required to do this is as follows:

  <META HTTP-EQUIV="refresh" CONTENT="15;
URL=http://www.ioe.ac.uk/infoserv/ishome.htm">

  This code goes inside the <HEAD> </HEAD> section of the HTML document. The
CONTENT section specifies how many seconds to wait before rerouting plus the
URL to go to after that time. if you set the time to zero (0) the page will
reroute immediately but the current page still has to load so it is best to
use the same background colour or image with no foreground content to
disguise the changeover. If you provide a finite delay you can give the user
a message suggesting resetting links or bookmarks, as in the example.   "

I now have had the horrid thought that the e-gov automated system
has shuffled the contents of old pages, so perhaps www.doh.gov.uk/nsf does
indeed no longer exist, so no redirection possible.  With the old page you
at least felt there was someone at a desk looking after NSFs and the web
page that went with them. The two functions may now divorced: A call centre
approach to web pages creation! AAAARH!

 Gerry Bulger

  http://www.bulger.co.uk

My original email:
> Dear DH aka DOH Webmasters
>
> Surely you should map all the old links!  This is madness. Search engines
> fail
>
> It takes ages for a list of useful sites to develop.  Cutting out the o in
> doh does not help...the links are not there!
>
>
> How do you quickly find  http://www.doh.gov.uk/complaints   or
> http://www.doh.gov.uk/nsf  and ALL other links built up over the years?
>
>
> Dr Gerard Bulger
>
>
> http://www.bulger.co.uk