Tips from Idea15 Web Design

Web, business, and marketing tips for Scotland and beyond.

Cue squealing agency piggies… 10 June 2008

Update 10 June: New measures giving Britain’s temporary workers equal rights to permanent members of staff have been agreed by European Union employment ministers.

Original post 20 May:

Excellent news today with reports that agency workers will be given the same employment rights as permanent staff after 12 weeks under proposals agreed between the government and unions.

Naturally, so-called “employers groups” and the recruitment industry are squealing like the pigs they are at the thought of their trough running dry.

As they should be. The 12-week law will force a change in British business that few companies are prepared to handle. For far too long, companies have used the lack of protective legislation for agency workers to act like welfare junkies in the benefits line. They have been able to get away with shoddy or nonexisting management, piss-poor planning, and a contemptuous approach to human resources knowing that an agency temp could always be brought in to plaster over their incompetence. Noises of concern, disquiet, or questions from the temp would result in a no-strings, no-goodbye sacking. They’re just temps, after all.

The facts are simple:

No company which plans properly needs temps for more than 12 weeks.
No company which understands human resources needs temps for more than 12 weeks.
No company with competent management needs temps for more than 12 weeks.

Any excuses or denials of those facts are just so much squealing.

Look at the case of my husband, who only recently was given a permanent role in the company he had been temping in for 16 months. When we became a family, I was on my own at home with a three day old baby because he didn’t even get time off for that. Before that, he spent nearly nine years as an uncontracted temp at IBM. The promise of a permanent job was always just around the corner, but eventually they shut up shop altogether and sent his job to Hungary. That was almost a decade with no rights, no sick time, no holiday time, no pensions, no managerial processes such as performance reviews, no right to ask questions, and the knowledge that the slightest slip-up - even imaginary - could have him out on the corner without the right to collect his coffee mug.

Both companies claimed that not taking him on permanently was because they could not afford to. And that’s what’s so offensive about employers claiming that agency staff save money. They are already paying the full amount to the agency that they would be paying to him as an employee, but the employee gets only 50% of that money, if they’re lucky, and no benefits.

The rest of the money, and the only benefits, go to the army of brainless, untalented bimbos who call themselves “recruitment consultants” because they have completed a two-week in-house training programme on aggressive ways to reach sales targets. These are the scum who told me I was greedy and worthless for questioning them (First People Solutions); who told me that my university degree doesn’t count because it didn’t come from the UK (Hudson Recruitment); who edited and censored my CV past recognition to force me into a job a 12 year old could do (Hays Recruitment); who sent me into physically threatening situations without a second thought (Hudson Recruitment); who sacked me for requesting training and had me pick up my desk belongings in a carrier bag (Search Consultancy); who made me sit on hold to a call centre for half an hour because they had screwed up my pay (Hays Recruitment); who did not issue my statutory holiday pay for almost a year (Hudson Recruitment); who phoned me up to scream in a rage because I’d taken a day off (Cuthbert Recruitment); who phoned me up to scream in a rage because I’d attended a midwife appointment (Hays Recruitment); who ran false listings for jobs which didn’t exist and suckered me into registering for them (HR Consultancy); who told me I had not been selected for a job when in fact they had forgotten to send the company my CV in the first place (Bruce Murray).

Agencies have made an industry out of keeping our workplaces stunted, backwards, and cynical, and the lack of rights for their workers means they’ve been laughing every step of the way. All the while, my husband and I lived hand to mouth for years because agencies are “just the way things are done.”  It makes me sick to think of how much some bubblehead was paid over those nine years for his labour - and for doing what? Smirking while helping IBM to sack all its subcontractor staff at 5 PM and rehire them under a different subcontractor banner at 9 AM the next day, to sit in the same seats doing the same jobs, as a way of getting around employment legislation?

With employers now having 12 weeks to put up or shut up, they will be more inclined to do proper planning in the first place to avoid using both temps and their parasitic recruitment consultants as plasters. They will also be more inclined to take on the staff as their own employees rather than renting them at atrocious commission rates from the bimbo brigade, and they will learn, slowly but surely, that you don’t need agencies at all. “Recruitment consultants” will be so distraught at the thought of the trough being taken away from them that they’ll have to cut their weekly cocaine budgets in half.

So already we see that the legislation is a good thing all around.

Let’s look at other ways companies use temps to get around proper due diligence. There is the case of my very first job in the UK - being a “dummy PA” at what I am 99.9% certain was the front business for a money launderer, a woman who was so visibly unstable that she spent less than two hours in my presence for the whole duration of my employment. She knew she was up to something; she knew she had to make the front business look legit; and she knew that she couldn’t possibly get a permanent staffer in. So she phoned up an agency and they sent over a diligent, eager temp - me - who found herself hoovered into the front business within three hours. Had I stumbled around the wrong file or asked too many questions, she could dispose of me like so much office rubbish. As it is, I beat her to the punch.

Then there was the job that followed that - an illegal role in an NHS facility. They had a backlog because the permanent staff spent all their time standing around gossiping about everybody else’s business; but instead of cracking the whip, they sent for a temp - me - and threw me into the front lines of medical hell with no training, management, or support. Had I raised a stink in anything but my own mind, I could have been out the door without a goodbye. But I didn’t, because I had bills to pay.

Had both of these companies taken me on knowing that I was not there to massage their feet while they shimmied about and gabbed, they would have been inclined to pull their socks up and cut the nonsense. Had the agencies known that they had 12 weeks to prove themselves, rather than being as good as the benefits office, they would have been less inclined to cut corners, lie through their teeth, and willingly collaborate with white-collar criminals.

The 12 week rule will force managers to grow up, pay attention to management and processes, pay more than cynical lip service to human resources, and stop relying on the welfare safety net that agencies provide. The 12 week rule will ensure that hardworking, responsible people are no longer trapped for a decade in jobs with no rights, menial pay, and smug, contemptuous attitudes held over their heads at all times.

Britain’s workplaces are finally being dragged into the 20th century. Eventually we’ll get to the 21st: the extinction of agencies altogether.

 

See no evil, hear no evil, Google no evil 9 June 2008

Filed under: Scotland — idea15 @ 2:00 pm

I continue to shake my head at the agreement between the Scottish justice system and the Scottish media which declares that the web does not exist.

Last week, five women were indecently assaulted within the space of 90 minutes in downtown Glasgow. Police very quickly released a CCTV image of the suspect (left) which the media willingly showed on every TV station, in every newspaper, and on every news web site in Scotland. As a result of the blanket coverage, the suspect was caught almost immediately and is due to appear in court today.

And now that he’s in the hoosegow, the media have pulled the above photo off of every story on every web site and replaced it with crime scene photos. The Daily Record went so far as to do this (left). Scots law says that the privacy and identity of a 15 year old must be protected, several million pageviews after the fact, even though the little shit’s face is the key to witnesses coming forward for the 11 assaults he has been charged with.

In Scotland, the web and Google Cache officially do not exist. The media and justice system truly believe that a suspect’s invisibility can be restored overnight after his face has been broadcast to 5 million people as a matter of urgency. The fact that ordinary web users can pull up that “hidden” information anyway? Doesn’t exist. We don’t see it. Fingers in ears. Nanny nanny boo boo. The longer the authorities maintain this charade, the worse it will be for them when it comes crashing down.

 

Google goes Glasgow 7 June 2008

Filed under: Scotland, Web Design — idea15 @ 11:24 pm

Google UK’s logo yesterday was a nod to Mr Mackintosh.

Well done.

 

Caffeine on a stick 6 June 2008

Filed under: Web Design — idea15 @ 2:08 pm

Please give a knighthood to whoever invented this:

Garnier Nutritionist Caffeine Eye roll On

It’s a little stick with a cooling eye gel, laced with caffeine, which you simply roll onto your computer-worn eyelids and under-eye area. Within seconds your eyes feel like you’ve just gotten out of the pool.

Definitely a must for those of us who have three CSS files tiled vertically in HTML-kit at unsociable hours!

 

Death of a web site 2 June 2008

Filed under: Scotland, Web Design — idea15 @ 9:53 am
Tags: ,

Gretna FC, the Scottish football club which flew too close to the sun and paid the price, now exists only on paper, and by tonight that piece of paper may cease to be as well. All of the club’s staff were laid off by the team’s administrator, including their marketing and web people.

If you looked at the team’s official web site last week, all you saw was a black screen, the club’s logo, and the words “Gretna Football Club”. All content and interactivity was gone.

If you try to visit the official web site today, even that black screen is gone. All that’s left is this (click to see it full size):


What an undignified way to go. There’s no site to see, even the holding page has been taken offline for non-payment, there isn’t a soul available to make that call, and there is no money to settle the bill.

The Scottish Football Museum at Hampden Park has a surprising repository of historical records, documents, and books available to any researcher who wants access to them, including the records of many clubs gone by.  I would hope that Gretna’s web site is added to the Museum’s archive for both the data records contained within it as well as the snapshot of time which the web site depicts. The files may be stored in folders on a USB stick rather than scribed into a leatherbound ledger, but the story, the statistics, and the ending are the same.

 

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

Filed under: Scotland, Scottish business — idea15 @ 8:43 pm

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

Filed under: Scotland — idea15 @ 8:50 am

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

Filed under: My Drivel — idea15 @ 6:32 pm

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

Filed under: Scotland, Scottish business, Web Design — idea15 @ 10:26 pm

…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

Filed under: Scotland, Scottish business, Web Design — idea15 @ 4:06 pm

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.