w3c: September 2007 Archives
I just visited the Carlow website. It's horrific. It's embarassingly bad.
Why can't they do something like Clare or Donegal?
Does a county have to rely heavily on tourism to have a decent looking website?
I'd have thought not.
Earlier this week Carlow decided to have a carfree day before the rest of Europe.
Whether this was a good idea or not isn't important, but if you were a resident it would have been nice to actually have access to some information on it.
I'd have thought the local authority site would have been the place to find the information. Of course there was absolutely no mention of it at all!
Anyone who tells me that egovernment is improving obviously hasn't tried to actually use the local authority sites for Carlow!
Why can't they do something like Clare or Donegal?
Does a county have to rely heavily on tourism to have a decent looking website?
I'd have thought not.
Earlier this week Carlow decided to have a carfree day before the rest of Europe.
Whether this was a good idea or not isn't important, but if you were a resident it would have been nice to actually have access to some information on it.
I'd have thought the local authority site would have been the place to find the information. Of course there was absolutely no mention of it at all!
Anyone who tells me that egovernment is improving obviously hasn't tried to actually use the local authority sites for Carlow!
I've mentioned Amas' reports previously and the latest one is as fluffy as its predecessors...
The main thrust in this edition is broadband "takeup". It doesn't mention whether it's actually available or not, which seems more than a little counter-intuitive, though admittedly they do mention availability in their own office:
The other part of their report relates to the mobile web:
If it's Irish companies in general I'd love to know where they're getting their stats.
While it's nice to see them talking about mobile sites this kind of vague reporting is not helpful. If you are going to focus on 100 sites and 100 only then why can't you actually mention which sites you are talking about?
They claim that none of the sites they checked scored 5 on the ready.mobi test (they didn't even tell people where the test was located!), so at least I know they weren't looking at ours!
The main thrust in this edition is broadband "takeup". It doesn't mention whether it's actually available or not, which seems more than a little counter-intuitive, though admittedly they do mention availability in their own office:
Despite a Dublin city centre location, and sharing the same street as the Department of Communications, Energy and Natural Resources, AMAS has been turned down again for a DSL connection.You'd think that they might have factored that into the headlines...
The other part of their report relates to the mobile web:
Leading companies and government bodies have a poor mobile and PDA internet presence, according to research conducted by AMAS.Wow! Great headline, but who are you actually talking about?
A survey of 100 organisations, split evenly between public and private sectors, showsThat's incredibly vague and the followup statement doesn't actually collate with anything:
most have adopted a mainly defensive strategy to the mobile internet to date.
A majority of both public and private companies have registered a .mobi mobile domain, presumably to protect their brands.Let's look at that statement more closely. Which companies are they talking about? Companies in general or the 100 that they looked at, but haven't actually named?
If it's Irish companies in general I'd love to know where they're getting their stats.
While it's nice to see them talking about mobile sites this kind of vague reporting is not helpful. If you are going to focus on 100 sites and 100 only then why can't you actually mention which sites you are talking about?
They claim that none of the sites they checked scored 5 on the ready.mobi test (they didn't even tell people where the test was located!), so at least I know they weren't looking at ours!
The Golden Spiders site was relaunched today.
First off I have to say it looks a hell of a lot better than the last one. The last one was dire. The new site looks like someone actually went to the trouble of designing it.
So what do we look at? The site or the awards themselves?
Well, the site is the first thing that you are going to see if you are interested in any form of internet awards.
As I already said it looks a hell of a lot better than the last site (you could add in a "h" there and it wouldn't make any difference), but it has flaws and by the bucket full.
I'm on a reasonably fast DSL line at home and a marginally faster wireless connection in the office.
In neither location does this site load quickly. Why?
There are a number of reasons which are worth examining.
Location: Ireland's "premier" web awards site is hosted in the USA. This gives it a ping time of over 150 milliseconds on a DSL line. Considering Eircom are the headline sponsor you'd think the site would at least have been hosted in Ireland!
If you compare that to say The Net Visionary site, which gets a ping of about 24 milliseconds you can immediately see one issue.
When you combine that with the sheer amount of data that they have crammed into the page it gets quite scary.
The total page size is close to a massive one megabyte in size combined with a further 9 megs of video (which you can't stop!).
Breaking that down further you find there are loads of images that weigh in at over 50k a piece. The header image is over 100k!
In some ways it's a wonderful example of how NOT to do a website if you care about your bandwidth bills, your users patience or general website speed.
The Flash based video is very slick, but why oh why didn't they include any basic controls? All you can do is mute the audio!
So what of the awards themselves?
Well this is the thing I've always taken issue with.
Of the 22 categories only two are free to enter - blogging and charity / community. All the rest require a 150 euro "administration" fee. Odd that, when you consider that other awards that have a commercial angle don't feel any need to levy this kind of fee. While others yet again don't have a commercial angle and somehow manage to run year on year without this kind of charge.
So what of the actual award criteria?
Picking a couple at random:
Best Web Design and Web Development Agency: Judges will be looking for the quality of service delivered to clients in the areas of innovation, meeting requirements, delivery, ROI as well as client and end-user satisfaction.
How are you meant to evaluate that? Work out a deal between your top clients and yourself so that they speak highly of you?
What about web standards, accessibility and all those factors that make a real difference?
Or how about this one:
Best Blogging website: Judges will be looking for well written, well designed blogs which exude the writer's opinions and personality. They will also be judging your blog in terms of its usefulness within a given sector and the level of feedback on the blog from the readers themselves.
Most of the top Irish blogs aren't even using custom designs and the message from the criteria is terribly mixed. Are they looking for business blogs? Personal blogs? Niche blogs?
It's really not clear.
The judging panel this year is strong, but what they'll be left judging is going to be the big question. If so many industry professionals take the awards seriously, how do they expect to get a reasonable cross-section of entrants?
Other people are as impressed as ever, if you'll excuse the slight sarcasm:
First off I have to say it looks a hell of a lot better than the last one. The last one was dire. The new site looks like someone actually went to the trouble of designing it.
So what do we look at? The site or the awards themselves?
Well, the site is the first thing that you are going to see if you are interested in any form of internet awards.
As I already said it looks a hell of a lot better than the last site (you could add in a "h" there and it wouldn't make any difference), but it has flaws and by the bucket full.
I'm on a reasonably fast DSL line at home and a marginally faster wireless connection in the office.
In neither location does this site load quickly. Why?
There are a number of reasons which are worth examining.
Location: Ireland's "premier" web awards site is hosted in the USA. This gives it a ping time of over 150 milliseconds on a DSL line. Considering Eircom are the headline sponsor you'd think the site would at least have been hosted in Ireland!
If you compare that to say The Net Visionary site, which gets a ping of about 24 milliseconds you can immediately see one issue.
When you combine that with the sheer amount of data that they have crammed into the page it gets quite scary.
The total page size is close to a massive one megabyte in size combined with a further 9 megs of video (which you can't stop!).
Breaking that down further you find there are loads of images that weigh in at over 50k a piece. The header image is over 100k!
In some ways it's a wonderful example of how NOT to do a website if you care about your bandwidth bills, your users patience or general website speed.
The Flash based video is very slick, but why oh why didn't they include any basic controls? All you can do is mute the audio!
So what of the awards themselves?
Well this is the thing I've always taken issue with.
Of the 22 categories only two are free to enter - blogging and charity / community. All the rest require a 150 euro "administration" fee. Odd that, when you consider that other awards that have a commercial angle don't feel any need to levy this kind of fee. While others yet again don't have a commercial angle and somehow manage to run year on year without this kind of charge.
So what of the actual award criteria?
Picking a couple at random:
Best Web Design and Web Development Agency: Judges will be looking for the quality of service delivered to clients in the areas of innovation, meeting requirements, delivery, ROI as well as client and end-user satisfaction.
How are you meant to evaluate that? Work out a deal between your top clients and yourself so that they speak highly of you?
What about web standards, accessibility and all those factors that make a real difference?
Or how about this one:
Best Blogging website: Judges will be looking for well written, well designed blogs which exude the writer's opinions and personality. They will also be judging your blog in terms of its usefulness within a given sector and the level of feedback on the blog from the readers themselves.
Most of the top Irish blogs aren't even using custom designs and the message from the criteria is terribly mixed. Are they looking for business blogs? Personal blogs? Niche blogs?
It's really not clear.
The judging panel this year is strong, but what they'll be left judging is going to be the big question. If so many industry professionals take the awards seriously, how do they expect to get a reasonable cross-section of entrants?
Other people are as impressed as ever, if you'll excuse the slight sarcasm:
- Red Cardinal
- Mulley
- Pete
- IWF - the thread that will not die!
- Pixel Apes
- Creative Ireland and again
