I have been engaged in a dialogue with TDCIT on and off this week about aspects of their website most especially how they could use freebies on the web to get their website to work properly.The google search facility that works properly (like the one on my sidebar) to replace their one that doesn’t.
A blog in a frame for their news page so that they could get their news items up before the become olds items.
By way of example I received 5 TDC press releases around 9am today and during a quiet moment between customers in my bookshop this morning I published them all between 9.44 and 9.53 with illustrations, they managed one before their homepage went critical and started displaying twin images today.
During the discourse I suggested that they could also use youtube and it emerged that they do have a youtube presence, so I tried to find it using their search facility which got me to the following; one dead link http://www.communitysafety.org.uk/ and the results a 2007 competition 8 videos.
In the end I found it using google click on the link to view http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=ThanetCouncil&view=videos
It does have 10 videos but no discernable out going links from the TDC website to it and no embedded videos on the TDC website that I can find.
As you can see from the clip the actual material is good like their press relase photographs that just vanish, bit of a waste really.
Since I started writing this their website has gone totally critical, I hope it wasn’t anything I said, I believe their problem from a technical point of view is that every time they add a press release they mess with the encoding of their homepage.
Thanet District Council, prefer us the taxpayer to know only what suits them, recently when it was suggested that the public might wish to see recordings of council meetings, it was suggested by various experts including "the doctor" that the expense was prohibitive, conveniently forgeting the availability of a host that we've already paid for KENT TV and whom when I checked said they couldn't see a problem.
ReplyDeleteTony I suggested that they posted the dvds that they already make of the council meetings to Kent TV, due to the lack of any action I eventually raised the issue to an official complaint, they have now set up a committee to find a more expensive way to do it.
ReplyDeleteWith the press releases TDCIT managed to get only two of the new press releases up with their associated images right at the end of the working day, i.e. because they are using outdated and over complicated solutions that they don’t appear to understand properly it took them all day to accomplish less than four minutes work.
Now I know this must be very irritating for them, particularly with me pointing out the problems and offering sensible solutions, but the bottom line is that we the taxpayers are paying for this nonsense.