Disappointing relaunch of The British Monarchy website

12Feb2009 Filed under: new websites, web standards Author: admin

As a web designer who is constantly striving to produce, not just nicely designed websites, but websites that have completely valid html, valid css and conform to Priority Level A, AA or AAA, it can be a bit dissapointing to see such a high-profile site launched with so many of these problems.

At the time of this post the new British Monarchy website has 10 xhtml errors, 5 css2.1 errors and fails Priority WAI A on 117 errors and Priority AA on 23 errors - even though the website states is passes AA in their accessibility statement!

The website includes skip navigation which unfortunately I could not get to work with firefox tabbed browsing - perhaps it works on a PC?

It’s not all bad however, the site is a big visual improvement although nothing to jump up and down about.

Come on Queenie - have a word with the website elves at the palace and make a bigger accessibility effort with my tax-payers money. The best way to improve web standards in this country must be to lead from the top and you don’t get much higher than the Queen.

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

3 Responses to “Disappointing relaunch of The British Monarchy website”

Fred Campbell
February 13th, 2009 at 10:31 am

It sucks. Even if you forget the legal requirements about accessibility and the Disability Discrimination Act, the site is just sloppy work - even on the basics.

Saving images to be optimized for the web in the right size, format is one of the first things you learn. And yet it has been missed.

Why is this important? So the page loads quickly and you don’t lose your visitors.

Take a look at the Latest Images section - wonder why they roll down, even on a broadband connection? That’s because of the stupid file size - each image is over 400KB, if they had saved the images properly they would be about 40KB.

I could go on. But what’s the point.

I helped pay for this site and I didn’t even vote for them.
Fred Campbell
February 13th, 2009 at 10:45 am

[Quote from the Governments website, Direct Gov:]

New features

“The new British Monarchy website has a more user-friendly and accessible design. It also utilises a number of new technological features, such as:

* integration of Google maps with the Royal Diary of Engagements to track royal movements
* a password protected Media Centre
* integration with the Royal Channel on YouTube
* a new personnel module to allow job applicants to apply online
* a new search function

[Come on, Google maps, password protection, YouTube, and search facility are totally basic. And it's not accessible, by any standards.]

“A star-studded reception was held in the Blue Drawing Room at Buckingham Palace to mark the launch of the new British Monarchy website.

The Queen was joined by Sir Tim Berners-Lee OM, KBE, inventor of the World Wide Web, the Minister for Digital Engagement, Mr Tom Watson MP, and a cross-section of people from the web-based community.”

[Good grief. Hypocrisy, stupidity, back slapping and canapes all round.]
DIY Dave
May 5th, 2009 at 9:46 am

Site seems ok visually.

@’Fred Campbell’
You seem to have a problem with the royal family. The Queen is a dignified lady who represents the country well. Not like the scum MPs.

Entries (RSS)
Comments (RSS)

About 939 Design

Based in Hessle, Hull, Yorkshire UK - 939 design Limited provides high quality web design, website development to web standards, inspirational graphic design, and multimedia, giving our clients the full creative service.