Thanet District Council, Cllr Simon Moores and leisure on the internet.

I have just been reading the local blogs and found Simon Moors mentioning my name: “It's very simple Peter, Lord know I've explained it enough times here to answer Michael and other's questions. I really can't be asked to explain it all again…” see http://birchington.blogspot.com/2011/07/spitfire-museum-special-event-14th.html

I think this may be my fault for not explaining things properly, as Simon certainly hasn’t come up with an explanation of the way the council website promotes leisure, that I can understand.

This time I will use a picture of the council’s homepage (taken today) – click on it to make it bigger – to explain, as best as I can, what is wrong.

The council promotes events in three different places on the homepage of its website, so I will go through them one at a time, I have ringed them with different colours for clarity.

In the green ring the header banner, to get into this prime spot on the council’s website the council has to have spent a lot of money on the event, the event should also be in Margate.

In the red circle is a section called events, further investigation of this part of the council’s homepage shows that it is generated automatically by an even more bizarre part of the council’s website http://communityportal.thanet.gov.uk

In short this particular piece of council IT is so dreadful that it means that events in October, November or even next year are promoted on the council’s homepage, while the main event this week is often missing.

I recommend that you click on the link to the community portal and try out this site, it is an excellent example of a bad website, and an appalling breach into the council’s homepage. If you join it allows you to write content onto the council’s website homepage.

You may ask why it is there at all, my guess is that a lot of funding has been spent on it, there may even be people in some TDC offices somewhere being paid to administer it.

The blue circle, right at the bottom of the page takes you the tourism site, one wonders how many tourists get as far as this.

The main problem with the tourism site is that it doesn’t prioritise events by their importance, so if you manage to navigate to their browse events page at http://www.visitthanet.co.uk/thedms.aspx?dms=12&groupid=1&areaid=355&nd=All you come to a jumble of events.

I may expand on this issue if I get time.