Having recently moved from Leitrim to Longford at the start of the year, and with the upcoming referendum on the Lisbon treaty just around the corner, I figured it was time that I should make sure that we are on the local Electoral
Register in time for voting.
Useful resource or pointless time-waster
The first logical thing to do is to visit www.checktheregister.ie. Seriously, what was I thinking? Did I actually expect that a website provided by the government and County Councils would actually be of any use? I’m disappointed in myself, clearly I’m not getting enough sleep these days.
Being the “design ape” in the company it’s very hard for me to visit a website and not critique it on how it looks. However, I am going to overlook it this time as functionality is the important issue here. On the site there is a series of links to download PDF documents, you can download a form to be included on the register for the first time or if you have changed address, you can download a form to transfer your details from one local electorate area to another. This is a good start, they are using PDF documents as opposed to Word documents which many of the County Council websites prefer to offer for some unknown reason.
Check to see if you are registered
Now we get onto the real meat of the website, checking if you are already on the register. I know for a fact that we are registered in Leitrim as it took several months to sort it out when we were living there. If I click on the Leitrim County Council link, the website decides that the best thing to do is open the page in a new window, fortunately because I’m using Firefox it just opens in a new tab which isn’t so bad. Forcing pages to opening in new windows is bad practice and can be confusing for the user.
Are those my feet?
So where has this link taken us? I have no idea, we are now on a page which has a random ip address in the address bar, there are several fields to input data and do a check but no indication what County Council we are checking. Seeing as I clicked on the Leitrim County Council link I can only assume we are checking the Leitrim list, however, no matter what information I submit it is completely unable to find my details on the register? What’s even better is if we go back to the main site and click on the Longford County Council link we get ‘page not found’, fantastic.
What is the point of this website? Was it an April fools joke intended to waste many hours of the general public’s life that they can never get back, or is there some other purpose to it that I’m missing? What I don’t understand is why you have to go to each County Council’s website to do a check and why there isn’t a centralised database contained within the main site, surely if they have a database containing the information for each county it’s not that tricky to merge it all together.
Accessibility? What’s that?
I’m not going to go into detail about the serious lack of accessibility on this website because there is no point – it’s a complete shambles, god help a visually impaired person trying to work their way around it with a screen reader. Just for the laugh I decided to check if the site passes XHTML validation using the W3C validator, which obviously it wont, 194 errors, lovely stuff. I don’t know how they’ve managed to fit in so many errors to such a small site but they have.
How the County Council and government websites manage, every time, to miss the mark by so much is beyond me. They are all a mangled mess that send you searching for hours trying to find simple information, and worse still, there seems to be no thought or effort put in to make them accessible. Being that this level of design and coding is something that the general public are exposed to, is it now something they expect from a website? As a web designer I find it insulting that this is what is produced from our taxes, however, I don’t see anything changing any time soon.
11:46 am
June 11th, 2008
Having met with a number of County and City managers you realise quickly that they haven’t a clue about ICT, and tend to outsource the design of everything. the trouble is they have no idea about the quality or capabilities of the groups they are outsourcing to, so you end up with rubbish like this.
One county manager explained it to me in this way. He said that in the Revenue Commissioners there was a requirement by the government to have an online presence, so they created a nice website where you could submit questions via a form, or email them directly. Then every morning someone would look at the site, print off all the submitted questions and emails and place hem manually in the internal snail mail, each in its own manila envelope, and send it to whoever they though was the most relevant staff. That person would then complete the request, send the answer back by internal snail mail, and someone else would then take it, type it up in an email, and send it back to the customer.
Bizarre, but typical of the governments approach to ICT.
12:02 pm
June 11th, 2008
That certainly is a very bizarre way to go about things but at the same time not the least bit surprising.
2:16 pm
July 3rd, 2008
Your article sums up the government quite well in the negative usage of ICT by our officials. The type of job I do requires me to check the local council website and it is a total wreck of a site for the following reasons:
Horrible to look at, no pleasant visuals, information is lacking, navigation is just brutal, you can go round in circles and still not find what your looking for, online queries are just completely ignored, and they have the cheek to run a questionairre regarding how great their site is?!?!? I’ve even spoke to some of the council officials and even they can recognise that thier site is very poorly managed and designed.
If you want a look check out fife.gov.uk (best add in the www. or you will get a server not found, tsk tsk)
3:18 pm
July 3rd, 2008
Hi James, thanks for your comments. I had kind of assumed that we were just a little backwards with our council / government created sites here and that other countries are more on the ball, clearly this isn’t the case though.
Recently a friend pointed me towards a new council / government site – http://www.affordablehome.ie/ As far as I’m concerned this is quite a breakthrough, simple clean site, easy enough to find information and with accessibility considered. I should probably do a post relating to that, after complaining about the lack of thought in this post it would only be fair to commend them on taking the right steps.