Wednesday, August 20, 2008

That new Number 10 website

In the spirit of all things new and funky the personal website of our beloved leader has been updated and the outpouring of bile regarding it has been most prolific. So what's the problem?

Oh my where to begin. We have at a minimum three different fonts being used on the site - Georgia, Times New Roman and Arial, not counting the one used for the logo itself. We have a BETA tag next to the title. No. No, no, no; no, no; no, no, no. This is supposedly a professional website, the only time you should see the word beta is alongside the phrase "We're going to be changing the look of our site click here to see it and let us know what you think".

If the differing fonts weren't bad enough we have a lack of consistency in colouring. The logo background is officially black (#ffffff), but the background picture fades to this from grey (#404347) and makes my eyes water slightly when reading the white text. The top story background is off-black (#1a1a1a). The menu bar and newsletter background are both off-blue (#5a798b), but the backgrounds for the rest of the side panels are a darker shade (#49545b) except for the history tour which is brown (#976431).

Fortunately all the links are all standard text black,or white, or an odd purple/pink (#ca5188), except for the final one which is a green/blue (#1d7a7a); oh and the menu bar which all hover in different colours.

Okay the text is all black. Except for the white text on dark backgrounds, which I'll accept, and the headings are um okay we have a purple/pink which is different to the links purple/pink (#ca3168) and make me wonder why the difference when they managed to get the green/blue heading the same as the link and the side bar headings the same colour as the backgrounds.

However one consistent part is that all the background images only have rounded top corners, except for the menu items which lack the corner on the left and the background for the top story which is rounded on every corner. Oh and the fixed photos which have four badly anti-aliased corners.

At least they're using headings correctly the title is H1, the sub-titles H2, and the entry titles H3.

Onto the next joy in that they're using WordPress as the engine with the NetWorker1.0 theme, that would be the Creative Commons 3.0 licensed theme created by Anthony of Antbag which they removed the credit from then stamped Crown Copyright on it. Ah but that's okay see as they've heavily modified it. Uh-huh check that licence page again you're allowing to adapt the work (which they admit to doing) provided that you acknowledge the source and licence it under the same or a compatible licence agreement. Crown copyright can hardly be called compatible.

Content-wise every main entry is indicated by a page+number system, trial and error reveals the first entry is number 8 and the latest being 16614. Using the news browsing view that shows 8 entries at a time you can currently get to page 242 in which the first chronological entry is numbered 2183, which suggests that the entries weren't transferred over in a logical manner. The tent> that appears would also indicate this.

So a site that's still in beta, crashes on the launch date, looks terrible, uses copyrighted work without payment or acknowledgement and simply hasn't been transferred correctly - a snip at £100,000 of our money.

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