Ok, it’s only a very, very small thing, but then so are atoms and look how important they are for the structure of the universe…

Why is it on the Direct Gov that some councils get an email address

http://www.direct.gov.uk/Dl1/Directories/UsefulContactsArticles/fs/en?CONTENT_ID=10011680&chk=swuAGe This is for Croydon.

But Haringey at

http://www.direct.gov.uk/Dl1/Directories/UsefulContactsArticles/fs/en?CONTENT_ID=10011688&chk=jI5CPl

only gets the web address?

If you went to Directgov to get the email of the council, in some cases you can get it from the site - in other cases the user needs to go to the council’s website to get the email address. And Haringey does have a direct email address because I checked.

It raises a whole number of issues.

1. Why the inconsistency? Surely Directgov is governed by a set of house style rules? Isn’t it?
2. Is it possible to download the Directgov style book?
3. Why those horribly long urls???! Let’s just try reading one of those over the phone to someone…(I got stuck at the bit with /Dl1/ in it - is it the letter L in lower case - l - or the letter i in upper case - I?)
4. What sort of quality assurance, or lack of, is going on here?
5. Why open a new browser - why not just let the user use the back button - it can get a bit confusing with too many browsers opening up?
6. Why is there such a woeful (or is it willful?) neglect of standards?

Now some future reader of this blog might look at the above and see something different on those links. Maybe Directgov will come to their digital senses and add Haringey’s email address. In which case let’s hope they keep a record of the change so that the comments I’ve made can be verified. Lets hope they’ve got a good digital archiving and records management policy so we can see what those web pages looked like on 13th July 2006.

There’s a whole raft of questions which arise from this one issue and the questions demand repeated asking because for something which cost so much tax payers money, it is simply not good enough.