We’ve been working on a social media listening platform in recent weeks and as a result we’re increasingly in tune with what people are saying about web design in the UK. We couldn’t help but notice that Birmingham City Council have been taking some flak over their recently launched website. Not surprising when you consider the fact it finally crawled over the finishing line 6 months behind schedule and seriously over budget at £2.8 million. I’m sure you’ll agree that it’s an incredible sum of money for a website.
Aside from the fact this website cost significantly more than it needed to, it’s also a website that doesn’t do what it’s supposed to. It doesn’t contain links to council meetings and agendas, the only way to find the information is through a search, which yesterday directed users to a broken link. Glyn Evans, director of business transformation at the council and the man with overall responsibility for the project, defended the lack of a link saying,
“How many of our residents are actually interested in council meetings?”
We’re no experts in councils here at Fluid, but simple common sense tells us that having a decent display of council meetings and agendas would be a fairly important section of a £2.8 million website for a local council.
“They are interested in finding out about what events are on and big issues like the library. These big items are of critical importance to our residents” he added.
If the library is a critical issue for the residents of Birmingham then they are ill served by the service on the new website. After two clicks from the main page we were taken to a less than convenient and memorable link:
Not only does the URL fail in being user friendly, demonstrating that no thought has been given to usability or SEO, once you get to your destination you are faced with an ugly block of text, bad graphics, grammar mistakes, and are left wondering, “where is the library service?” The page randomly contains “Please use font style sheet instead” half way through the already poorly written content.
Moving away from the catastrophe of the library portal, choose at random any topic on the left and examine how confusing the navigation system becomes. Topics randomly highlight in dark blue, leaving you clueless as to where you are or how you got there. Once you are there, wherever ‘there’ might be, you’re faced with stock option blue links, bullet points, and ugly fonts. Blue links stopped being acceptable in 1999 and here we are ten years later and Birmingham residents have been charged through the roof to have them on their website.
To add to the list of poor design woes there’s white space everywhere, no thought has been given to standardising layouts, images have no borders, icons are blurry, and don’t get us started on the code. View the source of any page you like, there’s more white space in it than a disused American refrigerator. Oh we’re yet to find a single RSS feed anywhere on the site, you can draw your own conclusions from that.
There’s a possibility we’re beginning to be pedantic, but it’s sites like this that really grind our gears. Such a senseless waste of money on a project that could have delivered wonderful and worthwhile results. We’re not alone in our critique of the site, Jake Grimley, managing director of Birmingham web designers Made Media, described the website as an “abomination”
“The website is absolutely littered with beginner’s mistakes. And content from the old website appears to just have been cut and pasted in with no quality checking whatsoever.”
Clive Reeves, PR Director at Ward Lovett in Birmingham described it as“an expensive disappointment”
“This looks like a project that’s been controlled by a committee made up of people who don’t quite know what they’re looking for, what’s achievable or even what they really want.”
If we set aside the horrendous structure, layout, navigation, content, and usability you’re left with the visual design. Show the logo to a designer and they’re far from impressed. When I demonstrated the site to our designers I was met with responses like ‘why the horrible blue background?…Why has it been drawn in crayon?…Blue and pink do not go…’ A few minutes after ‘polluting their eyes’ by showing them the website they sent me an email. If only they’d have come to Fluid.
You can follow the onslaught the website has been getting in our tweet grid below, it’s following the hashtag #bccwebsite. Let us know what you think of the site in a comment. Have Birmingham residents been robbed?
It seems that all of us Manchester SEOs could soon be out of a job. In recent weeks a website has shown up in the Google UK listings boasting of how it has out-ranked all of the major SEO companies and professionals for the term ‘SEO Manchester’. And do you know what? It has.
At the time of writing www.seomanchester.org.uk (ooh there’s another link for you!) is sitting comfortably at the 4 spot in the Google UK listings, but has previously boasted of sitting at the top of the tree at number 1! And what an excellent job it has done - it even offers SEO tips for anyone else that fancies getting into the business. So it seems that anyone can do this job - even someone that is new to the trade - and achieve results than those who have been slaving away for years. The site’s owner has quite rightly given himself a pat on the head (and another link! I am feeling generous).
Can you hear the sound of every SEO in Manchester collectively filing down the job centre? Me neither.
The site’s owner may have been well meaning in his attempts to learn a new skill, however bragging about ranking for a phrase that just isn’t competitive is to miss the point entirely. Is it generating anything in the way of relevant (whatever that would mean for this site) traffic? Is it making any money? Has it brought in any new clients?
The simple fact is that ranking well for ’seo manchester’ is like one of those people that tries to get into the Guinness book of Records by eating an aeroplane - no one is trying to beat you. The statistics show that the site only has 18 external links pointing to it which demonstrates how little link building needs to be done in order to rank well for such niche uncompetitive terms. Don’t forget that strong rankings are far from a guarantee of high traffic volume.
A few weeks ago a Keyboard Cat blog post I wrote ranked number 1 in the Google UK listings for - ooh….about a day - and all I did was include ‘keyboard cat’ in the title and the body text along with a few videos. The blog got a large volume of traffic - but no one stuck around to check out the rest of the site. This was entirely understandable as what sort of person who is interested in a cat playing a keyboard is going to be interested in reading about an online digital marketing agency? The post was done for a bit of fun and took all of 5 minutes to write so there was no clear intention with it to begin with - other than to allow other people to laugh at a cat.
It’s difficult enough to help clients understand the principles and technicalities involved in producing a meaningful SEO campaign that will bring them a return on their investment. It really doesn’t help the industry’s reputation when sites like this muddy the water and demonstrate that even some of it’s practitioners don’t understand it’s workings. Sadly, the industry is littered with such people who charge their clients for their services. It is only after realising that these people haven’t helped their company one bit do the clients realise that they have been ripped off.
If you feel like you are one of these people then do get in touch and we will happily discuss how we can help.
2 September 2009
by
Phil Harper - Social Media Consultant
Filed under
Social Media
“Twitter is the most difficult channel to crack, say experts” was the headline in an NMA article I read today…and yet at no point in the article did any expert ever say that. They did mention it being complicated, but the headline “Twitter is complicated, experts say” is somewhat of an oxymoron and leading with it would make you look stupid, but at least you’d be accurate. (more…)
These pictures are made by combining two images taken with a stereoscopic camera into one animated gif. The lenses on the camera are around the same distant apart as you’d expect human eyes to be, and strangely enough, the technique was developed in the 1940’s.
Having come across the technique being used to photograph hipsters, we wondered if there were more examples of the technique to be found online. Well of course there was, this is the internet, and it knows all..
We found some more great wigglegrams but they’re not in gif format so you’ll have to go and look at them here. As cool as this is, can you think of any decent uses of it? If you know of any other great wigglegrams, add the link in a comment!
25 August 2009
by
Nicola Thomas - Graphic Designer
Filed under
Artwork + Fluid News
Fluid Studios has undergone a mini make-over recently and today marked another final touch, the addition of our wall vinyl!!!
We also like to show off our client areas too… the nice comfy reception and our meeting room which also sports a Nintendo wii!! Come in, say hello, have a fresh coffee and check out our awesome custom table and screen from Lazerian while your at it.
If you are lucky we may even show you our green urinal and lazyboy beanbag…
Poppa D. Diddy Pop has been hitting the God bottle hard lately. He’s been sipping at it for a while, but recently things have taken a turn for the worse and this morning he started to gulp. With more than 1.7 million twitter followers Diddy Popsicles swings a mighty punch, and his latest tweet certainly showed off his social sway.
“If we keep God number 1 in our lives there’s nothin we can’t do #Godismyhero And we need to keep him number 1 on twitter so the world knows”
It caused a tidal wave of tweets for the big man upstairs. #Godismyherobecame a twitter sensation and instantly hit the big leagues getting promoted to the trending topics. 1900 tweets today by the latest count…That’s a trend by any stretch of the imagination.
Well twitter don’t want your “God” trending on twitter, got that? They don’t think God is THEIR hero, so they pulled out their social media omnipotence and removed it from the trending topics listed on their front page. Gone, poof, magic! Twitter are the real God’s here, and they’ll have no deity, Diddy Popped or otherwise, challenging their authoritah…
Seriously, they pulled it. Take a look for yourself. Even the #WelovetheNHS tag, with its measly 107 posts makes the front page, while #Godismyhero, with a might 1900 posts, is subjected to the cheap seats.
This morning, the new media age reported that The Daily Mail - (unfortunately) the UK’s most popular news site, will stop moderating user comments and adopt a free for all ideology to improve user experience. I’m all for open and lively debate but I wonder whether The Daily Mail suits really have a grasp on the can of worms they are about to open. If their comment system had always been open then they might have been OK - to announce they are changing from a closed door policy to an open one turns heads.
The most influential and powerful communities online tend to be left of centre, websites like reddit, b3ta and 4chan all have histories of comment bombing, poll hijacking and mass trolling if they feel the cause is just. When they hear that The Daily Mail, the most (in their eyes) laughably square and “old world” newspaper is opening the doors to descent the creative among them will more than likely think of a way to abuse the open system.
Who can forget the time when 4chan poll bombed the Time Top 100 poll? At the time, the press only reported that the most influential person in the world was 4chans founder moot, after he was voted to the top by 4chan poll bombers. The reality was even more incredible. What actually happened was that the entire Time Top 100 had been precision hacked so that the first letter of each person spelled out “Marble Cake also the game” - a reference to 4chans Scientology hacking past.
This isn’t the only example of large communities “having their way” with public votes and comment systems. Reddit went through a phase of poll bombing, having fixed the results here,here and on many other occasions. Of course who can forget the time when Reddit almost single handedly hijacked a poll to name a humpback whale being tracked by Greenpeace as “Mr. Splashy Pants.”
With a track record of running polls as ridiculous as “Should the NHS allow gipsies to jump the queue?” The Daily Mail now run the risk of having a “left of centre” community of commenters polluting their articles. Which brings me neatly onto my next point; with such a huge amount of comments coming in, how will readers navigate through the minefield of opinions? Reddit.com gets a huge number of comments on most articles submitted, and I’ve always considered their threaded vote based system as the best I’ve experienced.
Leaving comments in the order they were submitted is such a waste of a good discourse, The Daily Mail need to make good use of their vote based comment system to allow for mass participation moderation - a hive like mind. The best comments (as the Daily Mail community saw it) would float to the top, whilst flame like or troll like comments would be down voted into nothingness. If they’re serious about going “unmoderated” they should change their default comment display to show comments with the highest rating first rather than those who commented first.
TLDR is a new graphical visualisation system for large scale discussions, it aims to help readers navigate the massive threaded conversations that go on at popular online destinations. Here’s an overview of what’s on offer:
I think it’s a good start to solving a problem that needs looking into. A really clever system would not only show you where trolling was going on, but which communities those comments were coming from. So if blue represents trolling, green might represent “came from Reddit” and red flashing alarm bells would represent “came from 4chan”.
Would the Daily Mail, and other online publishers benefit from researching and implementing graphical representation systems to help moderate their massive amount of comments?
10 August 2009
by
Phil Harper - Social Media Consultant
Filed under
Industry News + Twitter
In the great link shortening battle, it looks like bit.ly is going to come out on top following the collapse of one of their major competitors tr.im. There was nothing wrong with the service tr.im provided, it was actually an excellent product with great brand name and a decent and loyal user base. So what went wrong?
There’s just no way to monetize URL shortening. According to compete.com, they had 800,000 users a month but somehow couldn’t turn that traffic into money. So with tr.im falling by the wayside, that paves the way for their main competitor to run away with the lions share of the URL shortening market. In May, bit.ly became the default URL shorterner at twitter.com, something which seriously boosted their traffic. They’re now getting upwards of 4m unique hits a month, but the question ‘can we make any money doing this?’ which was answered with a resounding “no” by tr.im’s owners Nambu has yet to be properly answered by bit.ly.
If tr.im can’t monetize a userbase of 800,000 people, can bit.ly monetize a user base of 4 million? What would the proposed business plan be? Some have speculated that bit.ly will mine their link data to make a digg style website, but they could run into a problem. On the blog post about tr.im’s untimely closure they described the problem link data:
And, the data that tr.im generates — the hottest links that people are sharing right now — is all well and good, but everyone has this data. tr.im gets hit by countless bots every day farming this data to create and operate websites such as tweetmeme.com. So, *everyone* has this data, meaning it is basically worthless
If bit.ly plan on making a news website running off this data, how will they be any different than sites like tweetmeme? Their data, like tr.im’s, can be mined by bots, so how will bit.ly stand out from the rabble? One thing is clear, turning monthly traffic into a monthly profit seems more difficult than you’d have thought…
If twitter step in and purchase bit.ly outright then they could at least make a decent profit on the work they’ve done. Aside from that, can anyone see a way for bit.ly to make some dollars?
It’s going to be appearing on TV later this year and as soon as I find out where you can buy the track from you can have a copy for your Corsa’s, Punto’s and Alto’s!!
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