Your tax money at work

[Sysman]

linky

The UK Supreme Court's new website, made by Logica and built on RedDot CMS, has cost the taxpayer £360,000 - and while not being an overly shoddy job on the surface, it's not tendered.

An article by Simon Dickson at Puffbox criticises the effort. You would expect, for that amount of cash, there would be decent HTML coding, but he reckons there are some basic errors that shouldn't be overlooked. Firstly, he notes that the site is primarily, "almost exclusively", made up of PDF files.

There is nary a single RSS feed to be found. Simon reckons there should be several, but not one is available.

We talked to a coding source who agreed with the notes on Puffbox. He told TechEye:"The worst thing is no tendering process - they were just given the work. It's madness - it's so painful, there's nothing complicated about the site. The worst bit may be pulling in the case details, but it's just flat data.

"It's not a badly done site, just an expensive one."

There are some rookie errors, our source tells us: "Firstly, it doesn't actually validate, there are no feeds, and there are broken accessibility links in one case."

[NickFitz]

At least they've remembered the really important stuff:

<!--[if ie]>
<style type="text/css">
html { scrollbar-face-color: #ccccc2; scrollbar-shadow-color: #ccccc2; scrollbar-highlight-color: #ccccc2; scrollbar-3dlight-color: #ccccc2; scrollbar-darkshadow-color: #ccccc2; scrollbar-track-color: #e9e9e2; scrollbar-arrow-color: #e9e9e2; }
</style>
<![endif]-->

[xoggoth]

scrollbar-3dlight-color ?? Bleedin eck. Keep thinking I'm almost getting to grips with this css rubbish and then some more comes along.

[NickFitz]

scrollbar-3dlight-color ?? Bleedin eck. Keep thinking I'm almost getting to grips with this css rubbish and then some more comes along.

It's something MS introduced into IE years ago to keep one of their big corporate customers happy: said corporation wanted the colours of the scroll bars to match the colour scheme of their intranet.

I'm not aware of other browser manufacturers rushing to support it. It's also a terrible idea from a usability point of view, as the user interface of applications should remain consistent with other applications running on the same desktop.

[original PM]

Simon Dickson at Puffbox is just bitter

winge winge winge no tender process

winge winge winge

company I work for has just splashed a similar amount on a website - not sure what the results will be like though.

[NickFitz]

Another example of effective use of taxpayers' money: A government department paid an extra £32,000 for the "executive" range of recycling waste bins to impress visitors.