Papering over the cracks at Number 10
The Prime Minister's office has a new website to highlight the activities of the PM. At the time of writing that's Gordon Brown, but by the time this email arrives on your desk, who knows?
Speaking as a web designer, the new Number 10 website makes me cringe. First off all, it is fixed width and only displays properly on a 1024 pixel wide screen. Use a smaller window and you get a horizontal scroll bar. Use a larger screen and and you get ugly gutters of wasted space down each side of the screen. Look at it with a voice browser or other accessibility aid and you will be irritated by the superficial Alt texts and the meaningless link texts such as "Go..." and "Read More....".
But the thing which really grates is the way it tries to be hip and trendy. It has Flickr galleries and YouTube channels, Twitter headlines, Podcasts, DiggIt icons and Facebook links. Is there any gadget it doesn't have? It even has a page banner which declares it to be "BETA". I wonder if the designers know what Beta means. Do they think it means Cool? Does it mean we have a Beta-version Prime Minister?
Other features that you might think would be essential for a website, such as an email address or a working contact form, are missing. The Contact Us page lists the postal address, (which unsurprisingly is 10 Downing Street), and gives a fax number. Is this the best that the website of our most senior politician can manage? Is this taking full advantage of the Internet?
I continue to be unimpressed with many government websites and likely to remain so if developers follow the advice of the Central Office of Information. The COI has published a consultation document in which it recommends that public sector websites should ignore browsers which have less than a 2% market share and test only on mainstream browsers such as Internet Explorer which means it is excluding many good browsers and accessibility aids. It also states that the website should support the three main operating systems, Windows, Mac and Linux which demonstrate a shocking ignorance about how the web works. A web server delivers pages on request. It doesn't care what sort of operating system the user is using to run their browser. But my biggest objection to this document is the notion that, in this day and age, people still think you have to code for particular browsers. If websites are built to W3C standards then they will work on the vast majority of browsers both now and in the future. Encouraging public sector website designers to optimise for particular browsers or screen sizes is a backward step.
18th September 2008
This article comes from the SKILLZONE email newsletter, published monthly since January 2008, and covering topics related to technology and the internet. All articles and artwork in the SKILLZONE newsletter are orignal content.