The Herald scrapes the bottom of the barrel - again 18 May 2008

I’ve written yet another letter to the knuckle-draggers at the Glasgow Herald family of newspapers, this time to the Herald’s online editor.

What century is this, and what backwards, backwoods cave are these people living in?

If the selection of thumbnail photo used in your Politics section today - screen grab below - was your idea of a joke, I can assure you that I, along with many other readers, fail to see the humour.

I do not believe that it is coincidental that the story highlighted a talented young female professional who took on the “old boys club”. The choice of photo can only be taken as the old boys’ club response, and the Herald lowers itself by proudly declaring its membership within it.

BBC Radio Scotland’s programme on your falling advertising revenues was fascinating. As a business owner who will certainly not be advertising in your family of newspapers anytime soon, I now fully understand why those numbers are dwindling.

EDIT:
Response from the Herald:
Thank you for your email. The Herald’s content management system automatically crops our pictures. This is the unfortunate reason why the picture on our website was inappropriate.

As soon as we became aware of the problem we manually altered the thumbnail selection.

I can only apologise for the inappropriate selection and tell you we will be monitoring this more closely in the future.

You have to admire the breathtaking audacity of telling a professional web site designer that the CMS had a brain of its own which caused it to crop a photo precisely on the subject’s breasts. Funny, but I’ve never seen a photo of Alex Salmond, Tom Hunter, or Nacho Novo “automatically cropped” - by the CMS, of course - to show only their Y-fronts. If that excuse were true, that web site would have more abstract artwork than the GOMA.

But “it wasnae us, it was the CMS!”

I have always worked by the philosophy which says that a bad workman blames his tools. If I let an inside joke like that slip through supervision for one of my clients and then blamed it on the CMS, I would fully invite them to sack my sorry ass. But I’m proud to say that it will never happen.

I also work by the words of the great American philosopher, Judge Judith Sheindlin:
“Don’t piss on my leg and tell me it’s raining.”

Gah. 15 May 2008

What a (insert every curse word possible) day for Scottish football. Within the space of a few hours, Rangers lost the UEFA Cup Final to Zenit St. Petersburg, and Celtic coach Tommy Burns lost his battle with cancer.

Appropriate then that it’s grey and chilly today - football is not a matter of life and death, it’s much more important than that.

Of all the tributes I’ve read to him today, this one spoke to me the most.

When he was let go by Celtic in the 1990’s he was offered the opportunity to leave by a side entrance and he, rightly, refused instead walked out the front door with his head held high.

The word from Beirut 12 May 2008

While I spent the weekend having fun in the sun at a holiday resort, my good friend Paul was blogging for Time Magazine from under siege at his new home in Beirut. Read here:

http://www.time-blog.com/swampland/2008/05/the_word_from_beirut.html

http://www.time-blog.com/swampland/2008/05/more_from_beirut.html

http://www.time-blog.com/swampland/2008/05/the_seige_is_lifted.html

http://www.time-blog.com/swampland/2008/05/the_news_from_lebanon.html

I had a great Skype video chat with him this evening, with the goal of telling him - as one poster in a blog post said - to “knock off the Hemingway crap”, but I left the chat completely reassured.  The contrast of the chat could not have been greater, as I sat here in the sunshine with my daughter napping in my lap while he sat with blackout curtains drawn and the call to prayer wailing outside. Technology never seemed so surreal.

Fresh coat of paint 6 May 2008

…because it’s springtime and why not?

Today I relaunched my own web site at http://www.idea15webdesign.com.

My executive coach told me that my old web site design was an unconscious mirror of where my self confidence was when I first started up my business: like me, the design was so small, ornate, and confined that it made me appear to be whispering from behind a screen in a small box.

I don’t feel like I’m whispering from a tiny painted box anymore. And that’s a very good thing.

This cost £100,000? 5 May 2008

Today the Scotsman exposed the latest private party in the world of public sector web site creation.

http://www.booksfromscotland.com

I had never heard of Books from Scotland until today (there is no offline marketing or strategy for it), even though I worked at a fellow Scottish arts organisation when the site had just been launched. Even if I had heard of it, I would not pay £20 for a book I could get off Amazon for £10.

And doesn’t every six-figure site have an 800px layout, pixilated JPEGs, and a minimum of 40 coding errors per page? The design looks like a wireframe rough draft. As a customer, I would look at that and say to the designer “that’s great for a start, what comes next?”

The full expose is at http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/latestnews/Scottish-literature-website-damned-for.4049879.jp

It’s a shame too.  It’s a great idea and it looks like a great database. But as their business development manager says in defense of selling fewer books in a year than most high street bookshops sell in a week:

“We never said sales were going to be a prime aspect,” she said. “As long as sales have been made of books by Scottish publishers, then we have done our job.”

Only in the Scottish public sector would a business development manager say it’s not her job to sell the product.  At the current rate of sales, it would take six and a half years to recoup the site’s original cost.

But hey, who needs solid business decisions - just wave the flag and the objective’s been met. And the gravy train goes on and on.