In honour of direct.gov.uk breaking 10 million visits a month I’ve trawled through some old presentation slides to find images of its predecessors: the original much loved and much mourned (by some) open.gov.uk, some iterations of ukonline.gov.uk and finally the first image of direct.gov.uk
Apologies for the image quality on some of these – they’re swiped from small images on powerpoint slides for which the source images are long since lost.
1) Open.gov.uk (From February 2000 although this existed in at least 1997 and probably before) … this is the departmental index page. I took this from the way back machine which doesn’t seem to store images (or, if it does, I couldn’t get them to show)
2) The original ukonline.gov.uk (from February 2001 when BT developed it)
3) An update ukonline.gov.uk – from October 2001 – when we’d figured out that search really was important and shouldn’t be hidden one page down and had also introduced registration
4) A fully refreshed design, developed by Sapient, and put live in early 2002
5) The direct.gov.uk homepage shortly after launch, in mid-2004
6) The direct.gov homepage from January 2007
7) And, finally, direct.gov.uk today, mid-May 2009
