Provide guidance around using the header for non GOV.UK contexts

[36degrees]

What

Add guidance to the header component that explains how and/or when to use the header in a non GOV.UK context.

As part of this, we need to decide:

• whether it's appropriate for non GOV.UK websites or services to use the 'black bar with blue underline'
• how re-usable the header component is outside of GOV.UK

It may make sense to instead encourage users to build their own header component.

Once we've worked out what we want users to do, we should add guidance that helps them to do the right thing.

Why

At the minute, there's no easy way to customise the header for use in non-GOV.UK contexts (e.g. by removing the logo)

We sometimes see users customising the HTML or CSS in unexpected ways in order to adapt it to be used in ways it was never really intended.

Depends on…

• Make it possible to override or remove the Crown logotype from the header (Make it possible to override or remove the Crown logotype from the header govuk-frontend#1639) – if we decide that this is something we want users to be able to do.

Related

• Provide guidance and examples for full-width headers Provide guidance and examples for different width pages #1171

[36degrees]

The CAA 'drone registration service' provides an interesting example of strange things that can happen when users override the header in unexpected ways. They're overriding the styles in the header using a separate stylesheet.

If for whatever reason their stylesheet fails to load (e.g. network interruption), the service ends up looking like this: