Happy Man: Well, gosh, the Prime Minister has wised up to the tiny amount of UK residents who know what twitter is, and has launched number10.gov.uk, the official website of the Prme Ministers office. Or, as it was apparently billed for a while: “10 Downing Street website, the official website of the British Prime Minister Tony Blair”
Oh dear. That link, by the way, from Dizzy Thinks, whose comprehensive coverage is better than anything I'll manage. As he hasn't deigned to use a convenient tag, here's the litany of fail:
Somewhere, this freelancer is cussing the government, who've taken the hard work he gifted to the world under a creative commons licence. All he asked for was some attribution, and hiding it away in files that 1% of your audience might check out is just a bit weaselly. And given that all the guy asked was that you paid what you felt you could (donationware), the fact that he wasn't paid at all looks a bit mean. Still, let's hope he gets some business out of the scandal. Seriously though, for a government that loves the idea of copyright so much, this is poor behaviour.
So the site doesn't match .gov standards for accessibility, but then those standards are not entirely up to date with current web standards, so it's difficult. Unforgiveable; some content is currently inaccessible to people with javascript turned off. So this is a big fail. And so deliciously hypocritical.
- RSS feedsThe addresses of the RSS feeds on the site pointed to the internal server addresses at whatever (hopefully .gov) network centre is hosting the site. Not just sloppy, but a bit of a security fubar.
- PerformanceEasy enough. The site fell over. On the day it launched.
- Cost & wordpressThis is the big one, and I'll have more to say below. The taxpayer paid £100K for this. And despite all that cash it was built with a tool that's not entirely suitable from either a security or scalability perspective.
That £100K is a big sum. I work for a company that does just this sort of stuff, and, well, I'm entirely aware of how much time it takes, and how much work is needed. Wordpress is an amazing piece of software, and a star in the open source firmanent, but this is a wordpress install that's been laden down with a few too many addons, and is now a long way from it's roots as a personal publishing tool. Wordpress (the company this time, not the software), runs a massive, multi-user installation of wordpress at wordpress.com, which serves millions each days. This is not the same as the wordpress software that number10.gov.uk is using. It can be made to work, but there's something about wordpress used like this that reminds me; given a good hammer, everything starts to look like a nail. There are better solutions out there for large scale installations. Especially when they are this public facing and you've got some cash to play with. Wordpress is, again, really great, but even amongst open source software it isn't the right tool for this job.
The petitions part of the site, which has been far and away the most successful web-democracy initiative of this government, is still there. It was built by some lovely and incredibly talented people at mysociety, who are doing very good stuff like TheyWorkForYou and making FoI requests much easier. Not that you'd now know it was built by mysociety, unless you made a big effort to click around and check it out. You might even be confused enough to think that our Hoxtonite media agency did some actual web development for that £100K, but rest assured, they just prettied up the work of mysociety.
I'm going to be generous in discussion of the £100K; let's say that covers the whole years worth of support for the site, paying for the web servers and a lot of croissants at a lot of morning meetings. How can it not cover paying the person whose design you are using. Only you've made it a little less accessible. Outstanding. And I'm still looking at the large majority of that cash remaining in my estimations. We need to know more about what has been done with the site to understand if, say, vast sums have been spent on security consultants to beef up the inevitable problems when an update to wordpress is released and the administrators take a little while to get round to updating number10.gov.uk. Speaking of New Media Maze, and to top all this off; here's their MD exhibiting an incredible amount of butthurt in the comments on Mike Rouse's blog:
# dave Says:
August 18th, 2008 at 11:13 am
I’m the MD of New Media Maze. The site build didn’t cost anywhere near £100k so everyone can get off their highhorses.
You know nothing about the complexity of the project or the parameters within which we had to operate so please don’t pass judgement without knowing the facts. This isn’t just a standard Wordpress install and Downing Street isn’t a ‘normal’ client to work for.
I'll leave Ted to respond to that:
Protip: if you are the subject of a takedown, the worst thing you can do is try to defend yourself in the comments. It makes you look like you care what some shithead blogger has to say about you. If you do care that much about the critics, maybe starting a company isn't for you.
'Happy Man' is known to the Editors
