Important note for LPAs re broken links

Hi,
I’ve been asked if there will be a problem with broken links following our redesign. The answer is, hopefully not – but it depends on how you are linking to us.

If you are using the discrete links we recommend in the LPA Links pack then there should be no problem.

Discrete links like “www.planningportal.gov.uk/apply” have been reallocated to the revised pages. There are around 50-60 of these, which we checked very recently.

However, if you have ‘deep’ links to our pages several levels down in the navigation they will inevitably break. There’s not much we can do about this is as the information architecture is fundamentally different and matching every instance across every Local Authority would be an impossible task for us to resource.

To mitigate the inconvenience, we are using a custom Error 404 page (in non-techie speak – ‘we can’t find the page you’re looking for’ here are some suggestions).

This will provide a ‘friendly’ apology for the broken link and highlights the new site map at the bottom of the page showing the top two levels of content.

It also gives you a search box within the context of the error message to help you find what you were after.