Sponge Project Blog ~ Web design in Tewkesbury

So onto part three of my Websites for Members of Parliament (MPs) series which bring us to Mark Harper, Conservative for the Forest of Dean.

Design

Mark offers us a well presented and clean MP website, with appropriate use of imagery throughout the site. Turning these images off also renders the site usable and useful, which is an important accessibility need.

Sadly the design is very similar to sites in other reviews and looks like a standard template. Which is a shame, because a unique and engaging design would really compliment the excellent amount and quality of content presented. Again the technical design lets the side down resulting in a very poor implementation.

Engagement

I’m impressed by Mark’s adoption of modern content types as he has lots of embedded videos throughout the site, which in many cases link straight through to his own personal channel on YouTube. There’s a wealth of traditional content covering a wide range of topics including a comprehensive and up-to-date news section. He’s even got a presence on Facebook!

I can’t find much wrong with the engagement for his site, which goes to show what you can do even with a rubbish CMS. One area that could do with some attention is the RSS feeds - offering one would be enough, but 4? I know they are different formats and by providing more you’re allowing the user to choose the one that works for them, but let their RSS reader do the hard work not them.

Accessibility

Because of the technical issues with the site the overall accessibility lets the side down. Sorting out the basics such as a valid code would be a good start. Using an external stylesheet for the CSS would negate the need for a text-only version of the site and probably speed things up a little.

Summary

A positive start with excellent content that really engages the user is let down by a poor technical implementation. Overall I give Mark Harper’s website 3 out of 5 stars.

Brilliant idea from the guys at Opera called Opera Web Standards Curriculum, essentially:

a complete course to teach you standards-based web development, including HTML, CSS, design principles and background theory, and JavaScript basics.

The biggest failing with many current courses and qualifications from universities and other education organisations, is they’re out of date. The web moves so fast, yet some courses are teaching theory and practise from 10 years ago! Let’s hope this movement will encourage these organisations into the modern age and start teaching proper web courses.

I myself will be following to help brush up on existing skills and hopefully develop new ones, specifically design theory and JavaScript.

Haven’t a clue what it means, although it’s something to do with the film “The day the earth stood still“. Anyway, the real reason for stating that rather obscure statement is Firefox 3. When you enter about:robots into the address bar you receive the following screen:

Just goes to show that the Mozilla guys do have a sense of humour. Sadly about:hoff or about:chuck does not give you any David Hasselhoff or Chuck Norris related goodness.

Part 2 of the Websites for Members of Parliament (MPs) series takes us to Geoffrey Clifton-Brown’s website.

Design

The overall design of this site is clean, simple and quite pleasant using a of palette light and dark green set against white background with grey text for headings. Use of images is minimal but used to good effect including the Conservatives and the Houses of Commons logos in the header. Dig deeper into the site and the good use of images continues with carefully chosen and relevant pictures to help illustrate the content. The Cotswolds page is a favourite. Even with images turned off, the site still works, with all the key content, such as navigation, header and links, displayed as text.

I can’t find much wrong with the design overall as it’s very conservative (no pun intended) and average. It does have a whiff of template about it and in fact looks very similar to other sites provided by the company that supports it.

However the technical design leaves a lot to be desired. The code used to build the site, whilst vaguely semantic, is invalid meaning cross-browser issues abound. By writing valid code you end up with pages that render better, render on more browsers, and render faster than HTML with errors. Essentially this is all about quality. It also helps lower maintenance costs of the site, although I suspect this is built using a CMS so this argument is potentially irrelevant.

That said the reasons it’s all invalid code is probably the CMS itself. The code is a complete mess! There’s no doctype, no parse mode statements and nearly 50 coding errors. This coming from a company that specialises in providing websites for MPs is quite worrying.

Engagement

The tone of the site is confident and reassuring, which probably reflects Geoffrey’s own personality - I’ve never met him so can only guess. A good news section doesn’t overload the reader and comes with helpful features such as search, RSS feeds and browse by topic or date links, something many commercial sites lack.

Although there are traces of audio and video on the site they’re embedded as links within the content so you are forced to download and view or listen to them in an external media player. It would have been nice, particularly in this day and age, to provide in-page or streamed content so the user doesn’t have to leave the browser.

Accessibility

Overall the accessibility is OK. The option to view a text only version of the site is welcome, but potentially unnecessary. As discussed before the technical design of the website will cause some users problems. Simply sorting out the code so the pages would validate will go a long way to removes these issues.

Summary

The user experience starts out well with strong, relevant content and useful website features, but the technical issues and the lack of overall quality let things down. So I’ll give Geoffrey Clifton-Brown’s website 3 out of 5 stars.

As a favour to the headmaster at my boy’s primary school, I took on some work to design and build a new website for them. The result is Tirlebrook Primary School:

The key need for them was a simple and easy to use back end, so I chose the ‘ol faithful Wordpress. I heavily customised Chris Peasons’s Cutline theme and modified the admin system to meet their needs. There’s a few plugins installed, namely:

• Quotes Collection - use this for the random “What people say” section in the sidebar
• Wordpress Ready Contact Form - another favourite for the “Contact us” page
• Google Sitemap Generator Plugin - great little plugin to generate search engine friendly sitemaps
• Add Alt - to help keep the code valid
• BackUpWordpress - does what it says on the tin and very well I might add

If you want me to build you a website, just drop me a line and we can discuss.