Our web and comms staff have been busy for the last few months, designing, building, writing and editing the new Leicestershire Health Informatics Service website, which, we are pleased to announce, launched today. The new site has been expanded beyond the core info , about our services, which you may be familiar with if you visited the old site, to include new sections on products, clients and news. If you'd like a peek at all our hard work you can find it at www.leics-his.nhs.uk.

The web team are always busy and had to fit the work for the new site around their ongoing task to provide a stream of eager GPs with websites for their practices. They have designed a set of templates for GPs to pick from, which speeds up the process no end - which is just as well because on top of that they also produce customized sites, like these ones they made earlier...

Leicester Fit 4 Work Service
Leicestershire Partnership NHS Trust
Leicestershire Nutrition and Dietetic Service

Our old small brown website is now consigned to the virtual dustbin never to be seen again, where it joins thousands, if not millions, of other discarded sites, a process that has been going on since the first website was built. Back in 2002, when the interweb was young, this continual disappearance of websites was already beginning to bug librarians who, as we all know, like to keep, order and index everything. In this article from the time the Guardian reported that the British Library was considering setting up a permanent archive so that concerned librarians could keep a copy of old sites for ever: British Library begins website archive.

A couple of years later that archive became a reality and has been up and running since 2004. Of course it's not just for librarians, if you want to search for sites you remember from back in the day, or nominate a site you think should be saved for posterity, check out the UK Web Archive - although sadly (or perhaps not!) you won't find our old site there...