Updates to this story
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."
In the original Freedom of Information request, it was asked if estimates on salary, overheads and the time of people involved could be revealed. The answer was: "This information is unavailable as this was only one of a number of work-streams within the Supreme Court Implementation Programme. The internal staff worked across the whole programme, and there are no specific breakdowns for website costs."
"It's a bit worrying if they have no idea how long staff spent working on the website", our source said to us.
Miles Cheverton, of The Tall Designer, told us he reckons a far better website could have been achieved for less: "A team of 4, over about 4-6 months with a budget of 80-120K could produce a far better site that matched the needs of the sites users far better. I've used Red Dot and it's certainly not the best CMS I have encountered and I wouldn't think it suitable for this sort of job.
"The site doesn't seem to have been developed with the needs of users in mind at all, PDF files might be easier for internal staff to publish but they certainly aren't easier for users to read or to access - why not have releases in full HTML with a PDF download option?"
The original FOI request can be found here.
Where are they getting these foolish developers from?
We have the same muckity-muck in my DVLA's documents. They are just all heaped and dumped PDFs without search options, cross-reference, imbedded linking, or indexing, and mainly you have to wonder about the broadly styled document titles to venture page after page for the policy that you're looking for. Policy, BTW, is regurgitated by the civil servants, but then they can nowhere show it to you formally recorded. Therefore, ignorance is no excuse in breaking a law. The most frequent being the nifty "driving under suspension"__ when the licence holder has no indication, by card or post, that he is in violation.
There absolutely should be published public criteria and bid vetting processes in this case.
Is it possible to sue "My Lords" to hold them accountable?
Marry! we shall ask the queen.
You can't blame technology for developer or editor mistakes. And any site can be torn apart with critic like this since no application is perfect. Only that your critic points are based on false assumptions and little technological knowledge of the RedDot CMS.
Blaming the CMS because the site is mainly based on PDFs? The CMS doesn't convert any content to PDF it's the editor who decides how to upload and publish information.
Looks like the editor doesn't get the idea of web standards and how to provide information for a web audience.
Don't get me wrong.. I agree with your key point, that the price seems high but it isn't clear what is added in the backend. RSS feeds can easily be provided by RedDot, again this is an oversight on behalf of the developer or maybe even the client for not asking for it or Logica for not offering it or again the client for not approving this feature..
As a tax payer I would expect to be able to see clearly what my money was spent for, project timeline, phases, technical plan. I fully agree on you with that one.
As a CMS consultant I think you are missing the point here and this is just another rant on CMS X because CMS Y is so much better (replace CMS with O/S or Apple or PC or developer or whatever..)
Cheers,
Markus
I don't think the author of this article is blaming the technology. They did use RedDot, though, and I can't say that their choice in this CMS isn't partially to blame for the inflated price tag. I agree that this web site needs a publishing type CMS, but I think they could have done better with something simpler like Movable Type. The UK web site is really not that complex and the development could have been executed quickly with a nimbler CMS.
Also, from my personal experience with RedDot, non-technical staff managing material, that should be in a database, using RedDot's SmartEdit interface can be counter-productive in many cases. It's easier for one to create a link to a PDF in SmartEdit rather than to populate the information into a database in SmartEdit (yes, you can do that, but it's very limiting and not recommended by OpenText). This may be the reason for the PDFs.
The search engine company hired may also add to the price tag. Though, I'm not sure what's going on with that because the search engine can't find anything.
Markus, you are a super hero in RedDot and I know you know your stuff, but I wouldn't get defensive over this article. I think its just a big project gone wrong.
Tom
Sure i'm a bit biased as a lot of my income is derived from working with RedDot CMS (there's my disclosure) but what does he have to back up his personal opinion of why RedDot CMS is not the best CMS and why doesn't he think it's suitable for this project? Those statements don't exactly add much to this or the original article.
In reading the original Puffbox article it merely notes that the project was implemented using RedDot CMS and from what i read did not indicate either way that this was a major contributer to the cost of the project or caused any restrictions or problems for the implementation. The original article to me highlights that the lack of tendering for the project was in their opinion the biggest issue not the choice of technology to implement it.
(if you want to get technical though i'd be asking why it was implemented with a version of RedDot CMS that is 2 major versions old and either end of life or very close to it)