I've always thought the GOV.UK site was well built aesthetically and even in it's robustness. After visiting a couple of other government sites I decided to find out what was used to build the site and what makes GOV.UK so amazing compared to the others.
I was well pleased to find out that there was a blog post on their website dedicated to the tools and services used to develop the site.
I've listed some of them here:
Frontend:
- HTML/CSS/JS - using HTML5 where appropriate, with a heavy focus on accessibility, and validating where we can
- Jquery
- SCSS
- A2-Type for font production
The core of the servers:
- Infrastructure As A Service (basically, they don't host in-house servers. This will ease scaling and mitigate maintenance costs) from Skyscape
- Akamai as the Content Delivery Network
- Servers run on Ubuntu GNU/Linux 10.04
- nginx used for redirection
- perl used to manage redirections
- node.js was used to build a side-by-side browser for reviewing redirections
