Political aside
I’m trying to keep off politics in the blog, but today’s (national) headlines regarding Jersey’s endemic failures in child protection deserve some comment. Frank Walker has posted a full statement today, which is really worth reading if you’d like to get a better view of Stuart Syvret’s involvement. Stuart Syvret was reported in today’s Daily Mail (what a bastion of disciplined journalism) as the whistleblower who was sacked for uncovering child abuse in Jersey. As Frank’s statement points out, the Police investigation was well under way before Syvret ‘uncovered’ anything. Syvret’s unprincipled opportunism should do nothing to rescue his ruined career, if there’s any justice.
E-commerce in Jersey
The Chamber of Commerce recent symposium on e-commerce in Jersey demonstrated that there is a wealth of experience in the Island delivering advanced e-commerce solutions with global reach. One of the prevailing themes was that the industry had thrived in spite of the lack of governmental support.It’s disappointing to note the link to e-commerce on the home page of Jersey.com links to a meeting summary on Gov.je from a now defunct policy unit dated May 2004.One of my new year’s resolutions was a more positive blog, so I wrote to the States of Jersey last week about this historical aberration, instead of blogging. One week on I’ve not seen any action, so forgive the whinge. I’d really like to see this updated (perhaps using the new content management system??) because currently Jersey is broadcasting the tacit message that it doesn’t care about ecommerce business, and that we haven’t got a clue what’s going on.
Jersey.com
Dear Blog readers,I’m on holiday at the moment, and so am a bit late to put the boot in about the demise of Jersey.com. Besides, nothing I write could come near to Robert Mackenzie’s Tourism carol.Instead, I’d like to look back to the ministerial decision made nearly a year ago by Philip Ozouf: ”The Minister agreed to grant £250,000 from the Tourism Development Fund to Jersey Tourism for the development of the www.jersey.com site …Reason(s) for decision:Following a thorough and rigorous process of evaluation the recommendation to the Minister is that Communique 360 should be appointed to the task of rebuilding the tourism sections of jersey.com website at the quoted cost of £250,000.Funding for this has been agreed by the Tourism Development Fund Panel whose members have evaluated the proposals from short listed companies and are unanimous in their support for this decision. The funding will be provided to a maximum of £250,000 by the Tourism Development Fund. ” (full text at www.gov.je).Signature:Senator Philip OzoufMinister for Economic DevelopmentSo, the questions I’d like answering are:1. If the process was so thorough and rigorous, why was a company chosen that has singularly failed to deliver?2. Exactly how much has been spent on the website so far?3. How much is being spent fixing it?4. How much has been paid in compensation for reputational damage, loss of potential revenue, and failure to deliver?5. Has £250,000 been exceeded, and if so, who authorised it?6. Who will take responsibility for this debacle? (The signature at the bottom of the above decision is just a suggestion).
Jersey.com Adwords
I do hope when Jersey Tourism launched their new £250,000 site they remembered to update their Adwords campaign…
Sadly … no. The campaign takes you to a very graceful 404 page.
Ho hum. Still Jersey Tourism’s blunder gives us a good teaching point for Adwords campaigns.
Adwords are Pay-per-click campaigns (PPC), which means you only pay when someone clicks on your Ad. Therefore, you should make sure that your site is running when someone clicks through, otherwise you don’t just burn Ad spend, you alienate customers (see Jersey.com above). Ideally, your Adword campaign should be monitored, and be linked to real-time testing, to ensure that Ads are only served when your site is performing properly. Webreality’s Adword manager does this, and I’ll post more about it soon.
Jersey.com is live!
So here’s my first thoughts:1. Site is still suffering from validation problems.2. Sharepoint authentication and sessions creation is causing around a 30 second load on initial page load. In some instances, the request is timing out.3. The text size feature crashes IE6, and breaks the page layout on other browsers.4. The site is vulnerable to SQL injection.
Jersey.com
Is now password protected. Very wise, I wouldn’t want unauthorised reviews prior to launch either.
9 months and £250,000 later …
Here’s a sneak preview of the Jersey.com portal. Followers of this blog will note my prior interest.http://www2.jersey.com/English/Pages/default.aspxThe site’s not live yet, but seems to be a simple reskin of the previous site with no significant increase in functionality.I do hope they get the validation sorted, at the time of writing there were 42 errors. Oh, and it looks like its using MS Sharepoint, which helps explains the W3C problems.