When I was told I was to meet the managing editor of Parliament’s website to discuss their recent upgrade, I was confused. Has the website had an upgrade, I thought? I certainly hadn’t noticed any radical changes.

But as I asked around, colleagues talked of a gradual improvement in the site’s quality, allied to new additions such as the live streaming of debates and committee meetings. And it occurred to me that there had been considerably less carping about the website around the office; in fact, when I thought about, I realised that little by little it had gradually become easier to use without me even noticing.

This slow, positive change is the work of Dominic Tinley, who was appointed as managing editor three years ago as the business case for an upgrade was being made. So Tinley has been involved from the outset in the website’s redevelopment, and he was closely involved in the decision to break the site’s refurbishment into small pieces rather than treat it as one big project.

“In the past, government departments and Parliament have looked at a problem, written a huge specification for it and put it out to the market,” he says. “Then we read about the failures. They happen because you can’t just buy one thing that will solve all your problems.”

Parliament.uk, in particular, is “not that kind of problem”, he says. “There are so many different things going on on our site. So rather than just buying one massive piece of software, we solve each problem bit by bit.”

This bespoke approach means that the bill pages and the calendar have been improved with an in-house solution, while the virtual tours were developed by an outside supplier and the MPs’ biographies are now supplied by Dods, Whitehall & Westminster World’s parent company.

In total, the project has cost £3m over the past three years - including the cost of employing the web centre’s 15-strong team. To a layman it sounds like a lot of money, but the total cost compares well with some departmental web builds and Tinley believes their piecemeal approach has paid off.

“You get much better value for money, and you get something that solves each individual problem instead of spending £10m on a new concept management system which doesn’t do any single thing well but does every task rather badly,” he says. “That’s good advice for anyone doing similar work in a government department.”

"Lagging behind"

The House of Lords and House of Commons, which jointly funded the project, agreed to such a large investment because, Tinley says, “everyone realised the website was lagging behind”. He recalls: “People were complaining, Members were complaining, and [managers] realised that they had to do something about it.”

Back in 2005, there were just two full-time members of staff responsible for the upkeep of the website and its millions of pages. With such resources, “it was never going to be good”, Tinley says.

As well as a lack of hands to put to the pump, there had been a failure to provide consistent funding for the system, claims Tinley. “It had benefited from a big investment in 2001, and then had been left and had not had continued investment every year to try and bring the whole thing up together,” he explains.

There was also a failure to think about the website from the user’s point of view, Tinley says; he argues that the lack of usability testing illustrates his point. This resulted in a site that was difficult to navigate around – a failing noted by many regular users.

“It wasn’t designed for people wanting to find information”, Tinley says. “It was designed for the people who wanted to put the information out. They hadn’t made the connection that you’re going to put your information out there better if people can find it and use it.”

Tinley says that the success of the revamped website can be seen in user numbers, which have steadily increased since work began, and the results of an external user-satisfaction survey which show that, on a scale of -2 to +2, opinion has improved by a whole point, from -0.2 to +0.8.

Now, Tinley says, “There’s a reason to come back every day. We’ve got news on the home page which updates several times throughout the day. Before, if you came to the site and you knew nothing about Parliament, there was nothing there for you. Now, we’ve got virtual tours of Parliament so that you can look at the building, how it functions, and get an introduction to the people working there.”

Even after three years, the revamping work is not complete; it’s an ongoing process, with new data and tools emerging on the site every day and big releases every three months or so. For example, while the old search engine has been replaced with a Google search, the team wants to improve that ‘quick fix’. Tinley tells me: “There’s a guy up there who’s continually looking at how it can be improved to make it more accurate.”

The key, Tinley believes, is not to repeat the mistakes of the past by having one big splurge and then allowing the site’s development to stagnate for years. Already, the web centre is putting a business case together in order to keep the investment coming when the current funding stream runs out in 2010. As Tinley says: “The change that we’ve made in people’s minds is that it’s not just one redesign that’s now been done.” This web may have been spun, but if it’s to catch more flies it’ll just have to keep on getting better.