Thanet District Council’s Website, funny if it wasn’t us paying for it.

Having done everything I could think of to get the council to promote this weekend’s events in some sort of balanced way, I had a look to see if there had been any improvement.

They seem to have balanced thing up by deleting everything from their homepage that relates to events that are happening this weekend in Thanet.

The link to “Heritage Open Days come to Margate” has gone, it is hard to say if this was by accident or design, as the other part of their homepage that promotes local events removes them for the day that they are actually on.

This means that http://communityportal.thanet.gov.uk/events/event/?EventID=610 that they were promoting yesterday, isn’t there today, because today is the day the event is actually happening, this happens to all of the events posted in the part of their homepage called “Events”.

The bizarre nature of this part of their homage doesn’t stop there, the top event there is “Murderers, Magicians, Madmen and Monarchs” if you click on this link it takes you to another page on the council’s website http://www.thanet.gov.uk/Events.aspx?EventID=561

This page tells you all about the event, apart that is from where the event is happening.

The next link in the list is called “An evening with World Tree Music” this event isn’t even in Thanet.

All of this would perhaps be amusing if it wasn’t for two things, one being that we are paying for this website and the other that we are paying for the council, to open various council owned buildings this weekend.

The council run tourism website isn’t much better, see http://www.visitthanet.co.uk/ some events are there if you look hard enough, some are not.

The fundamental problem here is that the council’s tourist information officers, the people who actually know what’s on in Thanet, don’t appear to have the facility to control and publish what is on any of the councils various web pages that are about what’s supposed to be on.

Something like a simple page showing the week's main events in Thanet just doesn’t exist and with so much of our economy based on the hope of getting people from other areas to visit Thanet, this sort of chaos isn’t good.

Anyone who doubts this only has to try and use the internet to find out what’s on here, with the council monopolising most of the high search engine results with various different and failed web presences, that claim to answer the simple question, what’s on in Thanet?