Sponge Project Blog

So it’s one year on from the floods here in Tewkesbury and life is almost back to normal for most people.

The recent Over the Rainbow* event sought to remind everyone about the dramatic events last summer, but to also try and put it behind us and move on. Sadly this isn’t the case across the town as there are still people in caravans waiting for their homes to be sorted out, so it’s not over yet.

Loads of residents banded together to march through the town to show solidarity. Some also went to Westminster to petition the government against building any new homes on the floodplains. Sadly the government still pushed through plans to build over 14,000 new homes in flood affected areas ensuring that if the weather conspires against us again, we’ll be in exactly the same situation! I’ll restrain myself form expressing my views on the government at this point as I don’t want the post to degenerate into a political rant.

Still it’s great to see the town pulling together and making a point. This is what a community feels like and I’m proud to live in Tewkesbury.

* Aside rant: I know the website was probably pulled together quite quickly, budgets were low and it’ll only be used for a limited time, but come on! Lacklustre design, invalid code, clashing text colour, no semantic markup, inline styles…the list goes on. It’s disappointing the production values couldn’t have been higher.

Bletchy Park owes us all a debt of gratitude, not just here in the UK but around the world. For those not in the know, Bletchly Park is the:

Historic site of secret British codebreaking activities during WWII and birthplace of the modern computer.

Basically without Bletchly our World War 2 would have been made a lot harder, not least because the guys that worked there broke the infamous Nazi Enigma code machine. Not only that the computer your reading this article on probably wouldn’t exist as we know it.

Now the sad state of affairs is that Bletchley is being neglected according to the BBC. Many people have commented on this, so I won’t rant on anymore, however I’d urge you to donate and keep Bletchly alive.

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.

• Part one - Martin Horwood
• Part 2 - Geoffrey Clifton-Brown

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.

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.