The Skatteverket re-launch

The best government website in Sweden got even better today

This morning we re-launched Skatteverket (Swedish tax agency, swedish) at 06:20. We’ve been working with the re-launch for almost a year and now we finally went live. I have only worked for Skatteverket half a year but most of my time I been involved with this project. The project has been to convert the old handmade (Dreamweaver) content into a full blown web content publishing system. It has been a really great project with a lot of system testing, building templates, validating content and starting to implement new features.

We have only at this point made minor changes in the layout and design, the major goal was to convert the old site into our new publishing system. The system used comes from Sweden and is called SiteVision and developed by Senselogic.

• Screenshot before the launch
• Screenshot of the re-launched site

The good things

• The site only uses variable font size.
• We have removed about 3000!!!! uniquely handmade HTML pages, and converted them into 22 template based pages
• Gone from 127 different colours to 20. (borders, backgrounds, images etc.)
• The site now uses headings, old site used bold as headings. Google will love us
• The site now has a nice search engine based on Lucene
• We have finally dropped the frames, hooray
• Print works (is still JS dependant)
• Great interface for designers, writers and administrators
• I would say we follow 80% of the WAI specifications
• The template system is quite good, I’d love to make it even better

The not so good things

• We still uses tables for main layout.
• We do not have full control of the HTML, CSS and JS code (The CMS produces all code)
• The CSS and JS is inline (Don’t ask me why)
• Hoping for XHTML in the future, today we’re using HTML 4.01

TODO

• Cleaning, cleaing and cleaning (images, strange layout converted from the old site, converting strong to headings etc.)
• Drop the table and go for CSS based layout
• Improve layout and design
• Improve the support for WAI
• Better information architecture
• New and improved services for our citizens
• Maybe a flexible or fluid design instead of fixed.
• Convert and move our self services into the CMS.
• A lot of internal things for better maintainability.

Thanks

• The great guys over at Senselogic
• The competent people over at WM Data
• The super guys at the IT department at Skatteverket
• The whole gang at the communication department at Skatteverket (where I work)
• The very best project manager from Teleca

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External links

• Partnersuche
• Hard Drive
• Launch Website Design

This entry was posted on Friday, November 25th, 2005 at 10:34 am and are tagged with: launch, project, Skatteverket. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Listen to this post Digg this post at del.icio.us, Technorati, Digg, Slashdot. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.