Tips from Idea15 Web Design

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.

Just launched is an all new site for Oryx Solutions, a business and personal development consultancy based in Glasgow.

This project was a top-to-toe revamp replacing a Front Page site which had been done in house.  It had two main problems.  First, the old site had exploded to something like 80 pages.  I know Jackie fairly well but even looking at her site, I had no idea what she actually did for a living or what she was really about.  There was just too much information hidden in too much jumble.

The second problem was the design.  The colour scheme of amber on purple was nigh impossible to work with, which had left the site compromising with a palette of uninspiring tones.  And as a Front Page site, it looked good on about five computers.  The middle bar containing her content was not even showing up in Firefox.

We spent a long time on this project, which turned out to be a blessing in disguise.  By reducing her content from 80 pages to six, Jackie had to really think about what it was she was offering and how to promote it in the simplest way, and this content revision process has had beneficial effects on her entire business.  She also used this time to engage the graphic designer Sandra Neilson of Forty Design to completely redo her visual brand.  Jackie phoned up Sandra after admiring the work she had done for another one of my clients and sites, Critical Mass Consulting.  I’m liking this business matchmaking thing.

So we went from this…

This is your site without Idea15 Web Design.

to this.

This is your site on Idea15 Web Design. Any questions?

Visit the new site at http://www.oryxsolutions.com.

Best of luck to the former Scottish Motor Neurone Disease Association today as they stage the formal public launch of their new brand and name, MND Scotland.

Last year I worked with the Association to revamp their web site from its original in-house format to a fully accessible content managed site.  Over the past week, we “re-skinned” the site to the new colours and brand.  The new site contains all the same content but “starts from scratch” at the new domain, http://www.mndscotland.org.uk.

The new logo is the cornflower, the international symbol of MND, and the new colours and fonts are bright and energetic. I was instantly inspired when I saw the new logo design.  Living with the death sentence of MND hanging over your head, as we did when my mother fought it for four years before her death, is difficult enough without dour clinical-looking support literature dropping through the mailslot.  MND Scotland’s new brand helps to shift the focus from dying from MND to living with MND.  And on a practical level, it reduces the company name from a fourteen syllable mouthful to a five syllable pleasantry.

Graphically we went with the new design and cornflower colours on a simple white background.  My Browsercam subscription really proved its worth on this project alone, as I was able to spend my time tweaking and not checking.

Although we originally launched the site to be as accessible as possible, we found a few more accessibility enhancements to make, and the new site launches with them in place.  I can’t guarantee that the site is 100% accessible to 100% of people with MND, but I can guarantee that we did our damndest.

Good rebrands done for the right reason are a rare thing, but I think MND Scotland has succeeded.

Much tut-tutting in the Daily Record today over a renown Glasgow department store selling golliwog dolls.  So does my local Post Office, along with “Versedge” watches and handbags, “Mii” entertainment consoles, “Emperor Leather” shower gel, “Schoolboy wizard” toys, and a full selection of knockoff tat and cheap children’s crap in Engrish packaging.

Standing in UK post office queues – as one does for hours on end in December – is painful enough without having to spend that time staring at a range of merchandise more embarassing than beguiling.  Does every town in Scotland really need to be offered a wealth of choice in £2 DVDs of American made-for-TV movies, fake designer handbags piled into a cardboard box, and knockoff toiletries containing who knows what sort of chemicals?

Protesters love to stamp their feet about Post Offices being the heart of local communities, but if the merchandise on offer in most Post Offices is any indication of local spirit, congenital heart failure is more like it.  Let’s hope that one of the positive effects of the credit crunch is a return to Post Offices providing real value to communities, and not hawking tat more suited to a car boot at the Barras.

http://www.criticalmassconsulting.co.uk

Two sites in one week, ooo err missus…

Just launched is a robust starter site for Critical Mass Consulting, a new consultancy firm.

I enjoyed the exercise of finding and using conceptual artwork to illustrate Michael’s vision for the company.  As the site is aimed towards a public sector/third sector/government audience, we had to keep the site conservative and understated, as tempting as it was to go over the top with the concept art at times.  When I myself worked in the public sector, I was disgusted (and still am) at how much taxpayers’ cash was being spent on flash, gloss, and over-the-top design.  With the shoe now on the other foot, I did not want to become part of that.

Michael is very comfortable with technology, so I gave him login access to let him edit his site content even while I was working on the technical and infrastructure side.  This probably saved us a week or two of project time.

I get the feeling we’ll be revisiting this site in a year’s time when they have taken over the world!