This is a post by Jono Ellis, our Social Media Manager
Websites within the Scottish public sector portfolio that are out of date, duplicating information available elsewhere or are no longer maintained help sustain a poor experience for citizens. Through working with our partners, we are spotting candidates that display these poor attributes and are thus low hanging fruit for transitioning to www.mygov.scot. This should be a seamless process for all involved.
It’s important that we get our approach to transitioning right to ensure users have a seamless experience when moving from a legacy website to www.mygov.scot. Redirecting and decommissioning is the bane of many people and is usually victim to corner cutting – resulting in wildcard redirects to the homepage.
Since our team will likely have to transition several websites in partnership with other teams over the next few years, we have decided to build something that will make life a little easier.
Why is it important to redirect legacy websites?
We redirect old/broken URLs for two reasons – to retain search value (e.g. in Google) and to benefit our users; few things are more frustrating than discovering that the page that you are trying to find in search or via a bookmark has gone missing. Broken links don’t instil trust from users or from search engines – and since search is such an important way for users to find content on any website we want to make sure that we handle transitioning legacy websites and URLs correctly.
