Why you don’t let your kid make your web site

I have shared my thoughts before about why professionals should not leave their web sites to well-meaning family members. (My main thoughts on it can be found here.) The usual arguments take a darker turn when it’s public money at stake:

TAXPAYERS have forked out almost £13,000 in fees to Cathcart MSP Charlie Gordon’s son’s website firm. The figure, which emerged in the latest Holyrood expenses claims, brought Mr Gordon’s total for the year to £36,760 – far higher than any other Glasgow MSP. Mr Gordon’s entry of £12,822 for “website costs” to GMG Solutions – a firm run by his son Gavin – made him 14th most expensive in the table of the 129 MSPs.

I just looked at Charlie Gordon’s £13,000 ($20,000 ish) web site. Go see for yourself. It’s done in table layout, its base colour is flamingo pink, it uses Flash for basic navigation buttons, and it has 45 basic coding errors. Worryingly, there are no analytics counters or codes, which means the MSP neither knows nor cares why people might be reading his site.

A 14 year old kid sniffing glue could have done a better job, unless that is actually what his son is. “GMG Solutions”, the web design firm which made this project, does not have a web site, a portfolio, or any basic contact information, and from that we can infer that they do not exist. So basically, he’s paying his kid over £1,000 a month in your money to fart about with a homemade site that is garish, unprofessional, embarassing, and neither worthy of the role of MSP nor of the expectations of his constituents.

I believe all public and elected officials should be forced to contract their web sites out to professional firms. I don’t say that because I’m a greedy cow who wants their money; I say that because if you operate at a certain level of public accountability, keeping your web site within the family, as Mr Gordon chose to do, implies that you’ve got something to hide.

Update 2 February: After a brief email exchange last week, I have sent my MSP a formal letter regarding this issue, accompanied by some research carried out on random MSPs’ sites as well as Sue Martin’s email from below. The minute an MSP submits a website expense for reimbursement, he or she consents that the web site is a publicly funded government web site, which therefore subjects it to DDA web accessibility compliance. So the DDA is the rope that these MSPs and their dodgy designers have hung themselves with. My MSP has assured me that he will raise this issue as a matter of urgency with the Parliament’s Equalities Unit as well as their IT people. My hope is that this will set the wheels in motion to create formal guidelines which will ensure accessibility and accountability amongst MSPs’ web sites, while making it statutorily impossible for them to use it as an excuse to pay their kids funny money for crap work.

Update 3 February:For the record, I have received an email this morning from Gavin Gordon. He has asked me to keep that communciation confidential. I appreciate his honesty and his desire to set the record straight. He genuinely seems like a nice kid who got in over his head and has been put through hell for it. We’ve all been there.

The issue still remains unchanged: this is not an question of nepotism or cronyism. This is an issue of shortcuts and the law. See my further comments on Doctor Vee.

Update 23 February: result! I received this communication from the Scottish Parliament via my MSP.

Our Equalities Manager has confirmed that Members are covered by the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) as ‘employers’ (of their own staff) and as ’service providers’. One of the duties under the Act is to make ‘reasonable adjustments’ to provide disabled service users with full access to the information and services a service provider provides.* * This could include information from a website. Members’ websites, even though funded out of the Reimbursement of Members’ Expenses Scheme, are not ‘official Government websites’, for instance regarding the example from the DDA code of practice your constituent quoted. At the same time Members will wish their websites to be accessible. Our DDA factsheets did not offer any specific advice on making websites as accessible as possible. However, one of our staff in SPICe suggested very recently that we could provide a ‘helpful tips’ document for Members on the accessibility of websites, and so we will produce this as soon as possible and send you a link.
In the meantime, some guidance aimed at SPCB staff is available on the intranet, at _http://intranet/organisation/teams/iieb/style-guide.aspx_. We are planning some training on this shortly (an SP Snippets session), and will ensure that Members and their staff, as well as SPCB staff, are invited.
Also, your constituent may be interested to know that our own parliament website is currently being redesigned, and the latest accessibility standards are being fully incorporated.

I am disappointed that they chickened out of the issue regarding Members’ sites being publicly funded government sites. No matter how they explain it away, they are funded by the government solely to carry out a government purpose. But in a country where even call centres receive taxpayer handouts, diving deep into that issue would be a political Pandora’s Box – and one which I’d frankly like to see opened up. Wide.

Aside from that, this is the best progress I could have hoped for in terms of accessibility. In future I would like to see some progress made on creating a proper and open procurement process for members’ sites, forcing them to use professionals to create professional sites and not buddies to create purple and gold soft-core atrocities.

Written by Idea15 Web Design

23 January 2009 at 5:19 pm

Posted in Scotland, Scottish business, Web Design

12 Responses

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Absolutely!
pig trough gravy train!
Just run the web site through W3’s validator! Rubbish!
A waste of my money, your money, anybodies money.
And it is not as though the web site has good style.

TommyAtkins

24 January 2009 at 11:16 am
…to say nothing of what hucksters like “GMG Solutions” – the web design equivalent of cowboy builders – do to damage the reputation of web design as a profession. I love my job, I study and up-skill constantly, and I will not put my name to second rate work. “GMG Solutions” p*ss around with a circa 1998 page template in Dreamweaver and get paid more for that one project than I brought in during my first year of self-employment.

I have worked with several clients who are recovering from having hired “cowboy builders” like this guy to create their first web sites. Every time it happens, they are astonished that I am charging one-fifth of what they paid the cowboy, and that what I am creating for them not only works properly, but actually brings in business.

idea15

24 January 2009 at 11:32 am
What do you think of Gordon’s claim that the costs for the website were only 1,700 pounds? I still think he overpaid for what he got, but that doesn’t sound out of line to me. Yes, I would have done a better job for less, but he probably would have taken a lot of flak for sending the money overseas!

Van

G. Armour Van Horn

27 January 2009 at 11:32 am
It’s a porky pie. Actual expenses claims from the SP web site:

Member: Charlie Gordon
Allowance Type: Members Support Allowance
Expenditure Type: Website Costs
Claim Month: April 2007
Amount: £804.00
Payee: GMG SOLUTIONS

Member: Charlie Gordon
Allowance Type: Members Support Allowance
Expenditure Type: Website Costs
Claim Month: May 2007
Amount: £708.00
Payee: GMG SOLUTIONS

Member: Charlie Gordon
Allowance Type: Members Support Allowance
Expenditure Type: Website Costs
Claim Month: June 2007
Amount: £1,152.00
Payee: GMG SOLUTIONS

Member: Charlie Gordon
Allowance Type: Members Support Allowance
Expenditure Type: Website Costs
Claim Month: July 2007
Amount: £1,032.00
Payee: GMG SOLUTIONS

Member: Charlie Gordon
Allowance Type: Members Support Allowance
Expenditure Type: Website Costs
Claim Month: August 2007
Amount: £1,932.00
Payee: GMG SOLUTIONS

Member: Charlie Gordon
Allowance Type: Members Support Allowance
Expenditure Type: Website Costs
Claim Month: September 2007
Amount: £1,200.00
Payee: GMG SOLUTIONS

Member: Charlie Gordon
Allowance Type: Members Support Allowance
Expenditure Type: Website Costs
Claim Month: October 2007
Amount: £1,441.61
Payee: GMG SOLUTIONS

Member: Charlie Gordon
Allowance Type: Members Support Allowance
Expenditure Type: Website Costs
Claim Month: November 2007
Amount: £1,709.38
Payee: GMG SOLUTIONS

Member: Charlie Gordon
Allowance Type: Members Support Allowance
Expenditure Type: Website Costs
Claim Month: December 2007
Amount: £1,044.43
Payee: GMG SOLUTIONS

Member: Charlie Gordon
Allowance Type: Members Support Allowance
Expenditure Type: Website Costs
Claim Month: January 2008
Amount: £1,464.00
Payee: GMG SOLUTIONS

Member: Charlie Gordon
Allowance Type: Members Support Allowance
Expenditure Type: Website Costs
Claim Month: February 2008
Amount: £144.00
Payee: GMG SOLUTIONS

Member: Charlie Gordon
Allowance Type: Members Support Allowance
Expenditure Type: Website Costs
Claim Month: March 2008
Amount: £144.00
Payee: GMG SOLUTIONS

Total paid to GMG SOLUTIONS, Apr 2007 – Mar 2008:
£12,775.42

I was particularly interested to see that the most expensive month – August – is when the Parliament is in recess.

idea15

27 January 2009 at 11:35 am
“Worryingly, there are no analytics counters or codes, which means the MSP neither knows nor cares why people might be reading his site.”

I’m not sure this is really a valid argument. Many of the sites I’ve worked on don’t have counters or analytics code, because we are looking directly at the log files for our stats.

I definitely agree that sites built with government/public money should meet basic accessibility standards.

Rachel

27 January 2009 at 3:33 pm
I agree. It is a terrible website for a ridiculous and seemingly ongoing regular sum of money.

Perhaps he is paying his son to write it up for him every day or so.

Nice ‘bread and butter’ income for him —- from us taxpayers.

bluedog1257

27 January 2009 at 6:42 pm
I’m going to share this comment on the issue which was posted to the Wise-Women list this morning. What I love about it is that it captures the passion and sense of outrage that Americans have about the misuse of public funds. The passive lack of outrage in Scotland is one of those things I’ve never been able to adapt to, and hope I never will.

I forwarded your email to a friend who is blind and who works for the US
Veterans Affairs office. She used to be an access technology specialist,
not sure what her title is these days. Here is her response to your email:

“I can’t comment on how things might work in Scotland but if public monies
were used to pay for this despicable web site in the United States of
America there would be all sorts of methods of redress. Not only are all of
the navigation buttons not accessible, tables are used for layout and I
found one thing after another that is not in compliance with universal
design principles.

Although this member of parliament defends having his son as his web master
and seems to think the biggest problem is the familial relationship, in
actuality, the issue is the very very poor web design that his son used.
It is absolutely atrocious. In the USA, all government web sites start
life as a template which is perfectly accessible. That does not prevent the
final product from being inaccessible. But at least it’s a starting point.

I think this guy should be forced to pull down this web site, repay any
monies paid to his son and prevented from having any web presence for at
least one year. In addition, he should apologize to anybody with any
disability for putting such a shamefully inaccessible web site out there.

Can you tell I’m fairly passionate about html accessibility?”

idea15

30 January 2009 at 10:34 am
[...] Update 02/02/2009: Heather left a comment pointing out that publicly funded websites must ensure that their websites are accessible to the disabled in order to comply with the Disability Discrimination Act. You can read her post on MSPs’ website costs and DDA compliance. [...]

How much should an MSP’s website cost? - Scotweb2

2 February 2009 at 4:11 pm
[...] because it “does not have a web site, a portfolio, or any basic contact information” (source) and “the domain listed on the invoices hasn’t even been registered” [...]

Charlie Gordon MSP: the curious case of high expense claims and payments to his son – Politics Unlimited | UK politics news

4 February 2009 at 4:39 am
That’s just not right. I’ve seen plenty of terrible websites out there, and I’m sure there are many more, but a site for a government official? This is taking the proverbial biscuit.

Nathan

4 February 2009 at 12:54 pm
Nathan raises a good point which is obvious to anyone who does a random survey of MSP sites – the caliber of these sites is just not appropriate for government officials. Charlie Gordon’s site was really the tip of an incredibly depressing iceberg. The general design, format, appearance, tone, age of content, and usability levels of most MSP web sites are embarassing to us as a country. Just one random example – http://www.christinegrahame.com/ If you were abroad and basing your perception of the Scottish Parliament on that site alone, what might you think? Is she supposed to be a professional lawmaker or an Avon lady?

What I find equally worrysome is that some MSPs don’t have sites at all. Annabel Goldie, for example, doesn’t have one. Or do they just not do the web in Kilmacolm, darling. It’s 2009, but the digital divide between generations and mindsets has never been greater.

All of this underlines why the Parliament needs to draft and issue guidelines for MSP sites, if not create a template (WordPressMU anyone?), and all of this has been explained in my report to my MSP. The Westminster Parliament put rules in place after too many abuses were noted, so why can’t Holyrood?

It dovetails into what I discussed regarding the even more wasteful Homecoming Scotland campaign – the unofficial reality of what people abroad can see with their own eyes outweighs the official PR campaign image that Scottish taxpayers are forking out for.

idea15

4 February 2009 at 1:04 pm
Heather you make some good points here – particularly with reference to DDA access.
I worked with a government department that dealt with some of the most vulnerable people in the country in terms of physical and mental disability and particularly communication. They had secured for themselves all sorts of exemptions from basic access – they didn’t even have a ramp to get into the building! They have only acquired a web site in the last couple of years, naturally it is hopeless, and until very recently they couldn’t even manage e-mail correspondence with their clients – some of whom can literally only communicate via specially rigged computers.
The private sector has been forced to put mountains of money into complying with DDA, but the public sector continues to find loop holes.
Go get ‘em, more power to your elbow.

Anna Raccoon

4 February 2009 at 2:36 pm