http://www.diverdiver.com/egovblog.html

Matthew

If they're "sliming" things down, does that make them easier to slip in and out of, or harder?

;-)

Surely text heavy is a good thing?

And why doesn't theregister remember my login details, or at least make it possible for my browser to?

Follow any of the "what's new" links on http://www.broxbourne.gov.uk from a non-microsoft browser -- oh, what a mess.

How is it that a so-called "open" government is allowing its councils to create publicly-funded sites that work only on sub-standard non-W3C browsers?

If you really don't have staff that are capable of making W3C compatible sites, sack them and buy somebody competent!

What a crap website design! That's one of the few websites I've seen which looks better when turning off CSS! (in Firefox <ctl><shift>S - needs the web developer toolbar). At least it's accessible.

Apart from the awful "design", the URLs are unusable as they use some numbers instead of text. And the page is rendered too wide for normal viewing.

Adding CSS to a site is supposed to separate the content from the layout/design. In this case someone's forgotten to design the site!

So, for a site that costs threepence ha'penny to build, I wonder how much they actually paid for the site? This is probably why the government are spending hundreds of millions of quids.

It's because often buying and hiring decisions are made by people who have no idea about the web. I worked in the field for three years, vastly over-qualified for the job I held, and when I left I was replaced by a writer with no web experience. The current thinking is that a website with 250,000 visitors a year can be run with no in-house technical experience.

Which is great for me, because as a freelancer I'm getting to do quite a bit of support work on the site I built. I wish I didn't - I left for a reason and I'd like to move on to other clients now.

It's the middle and upper management who need to be educated about the web and the need to make compatible sites - they're the ones making buying and hiring decisions. But from past experience I have no hope that it's ever going to happen.

"If you really don't have staff that are capable of making W3C compatible sites, sack them and buy somebody competent!"

You've obviously never worked in a local government environment, have you? Sacking a total incompetent who never argued with the points raised at the disciplinary meetings and had no union representation took almost year. I'll let you extrapolate from that yourself......

I worked on directgov. The idea was great, but the copy was gathered in from all the Gov't departments and most of these insisted that the content go in as delivered. Swore it had been signed off by lawyers and not a comma could be altered. Also did not get that it was complete rubbish. My favorite was on buying a used car, which did not tell you the legal steps you had to take (the forms required, etc.) but simply warned about buying stolen vehicles. It was as if they couldn't understand that they had to say real things. My first and last job for the Gov't.

The fun thing about this site (other than my proximity to broxbourne...) is that every part of it smacks of incompetence and design by committee.

Yes, they've used CSS. One tick point

Yes, they've fulfilled some of the *automated* accessibility checks. Another tick point.

Shame they forgot about a few of the others...

* Appropriate use of CSS (you never need pointless OnFocus, OnBlur, etc scripts just to change colour)

* Applied accessibility testing by somebody with more than one braincell

* Used JavaScript for important things, with fallbacks when it's not available. Oops, disable JavaScript and the menu doesn't appear...

* Produced a design that is actually visually appealing and doesn't look like it's been knocked up by a "talented" 12 year old child of a council member (talented, in this case = knows how to program the video recorder)

Mind you, I'd rather they didn't waste millions of our money on pointlessly flashy and essentially unusable websites and used it for important things instead. Like education, health, police, etc.

Isn't `Information Technology ´and UK Gov in the same sentence an oxymoron?