Someone famous once said that the true definition of madness is doing the same thing over and over and expecting the results to be different. Well I keep going back to the Sutton Council website and nine months after launch it’s still not any better. Arguably it’s worse.

Wibble.

In no particular order:

1. No redirect from sutton.gov.uk to www.sutton.gov.uk

That’s one small step for the DNS admin, one large dollop of timewasting annoyance for dozens of users every day.

Update 1 March 2010: This is still a problem. I thought it had been fixed but it was just a consequence of me using a smarter browser (Chrome) than previously.

2. Enormously bloated top navbar.

So useful that they let you hide it (now). Does that tell you something?

Update 1 March 2010: This bloated, visually heavy, space-invading top nav is still there. It’s grown a few new buttons, too.

3. No distinct visited link colours

Want to know which links you’ve already clicked? Tough. Perhaps the designers were off for Usability 101. So irritating that I wrote a Greasemonkey script to fix it. (Who says users never want to customise their council’s website?)

Update 1 March 2010: We still don’t get distinct colours for visited links. I’m still relying on my Greasemonkey script to provide this absolutely basic usability feature.

4. Abysmal RSS implementation

No autodiscovery. Homepage RSS icons link to a help page rather than the feeds themselves. On the help page even the enormous RSS icon isn’t a feed link either, just a pretty picture. And once you finally manage to subscribe, you have the exquisite pleasure of renaming “Latest press releases RSS feed” to “Sutton Council news” and “Sutton Council” to “Sutton Council jobs” in your feed reader. All of which makes me think that none of this was designed by someone who’s ever used RSS, let alone tested properly. Please fix it before one of us dies.

Update 1 March 2010: Sutton’s RSS feeds have improved but there’s still plenty of work to do. Good news: The feeds have been renamed with sensible names so users won’t have to rename them themselves in their feed readers. There are three RSS icons on the home page, two of which link directly to feeds (good) and one that links to another web page (very bad). There’s still no autodiscovery and the feed for Closed Consultations is completely broken. While I didn’t mention it in the original article, the major missed opportunity here is to provide full text feeds. RSS is a way of delivering your content to other applications so that people can read it conveniently, not a clever way to generate traffic back to your website which pretty much undermines the entire purpose of the exercise.

5. Distracting, patronising, juvenile stock photos

If the current homepage is to be believed, Sutton is the kind of place where people are ecstatic to have TWO ice creams, wear flowers in their hair and grow beards. This isn’t cool, it’s the dad dance of civic web design. How about letting the real content speak for itself without having to compete with this junk?

Update 1 March 2010: As summer passed, so did two-ice-cream girl and the hippy couple. Their places have been taken by different, non-contextual, distracting stock pictures. You do not have to fill every pixel on the page with stuff. Will the summer crew be back this year?

6. The clock/calendar anti-pattern

Put the entirely useless current time and date where the content date should go, then type the content date into the story titles. Is this really a content management system or is someone just bashing it out with FrontPage? (Extra bonus points will be awarded to any designer that can find the time/date on the screen of every user’s computer. Clue: It’s not in the browser.)

Update 1 March 2010: The clock/calendar is still with is and just as damaging to users’ understanding of the true age of the content as ever. Seriously, just delete it.

7. Search form uses POST rather than GET

Want to bookmark or link to a page of search results? No can do. Some basic instruction in the meaning and usage of HTTP methods required. Failing that, just copy every other search form on the entire web.

Update 1 March 2010: No progress here. You still can’t bookmark or link to search results pages. And it only takes changing “POST” to “GET” in a couple of lines of code to fix it, too.

8. No permalinks

1999 called — they want their URLs back. I wonder whether I’ll have time to fix all my inbound deep links and bookmarks to the site before they change them. Again. Permalinks are cool. Two-ice-cream girl take note.

Update 1 March 2010: Still no permalinks. We are still stuck in the link stability dark ages. How the CMS vendor can get away with this I have absolutely no idea, although it’s amusing to note that they don’t have permalinks on their own website either. Perhaps they should buy a decent CMS. :)

9. Don’t Contact Us

It’s there, but can you find it? Enjoy the multi-step form when you do. Wizards are magic!

Update 1 March 2010: The phone number is as small and hidden as ever and the multi-step contact form is just as forbidding. How about just publishing a general contact email address?

10. Subscribe to this page

Except it doesn’t work. Never has. Makes no sense. A small prize is offered to anyone that can explain clearly 1) What it’s supposed to do and 2) How you use it. I’m just a web designer and not a very bright one at that. Goes right over my head. (Tip: There’s already a general subscription mechanism for web content called RSS.)

Update 1 March 2010: The Subscribe to this Page feature is still there and doesn’t seem any different. I’ve still got no idea what it’s supposed to do or how it’s supposed to work. And RSS is still by far the best way to provide a subscription mechanism to just about anything.

11. £200K and rising

I had to help pay for it too. Now that really hurts. Got a spare £200K? You can get a site like this for your council too.

We are particularly hoping to attract interest from Sutton’s minority groups to help improve the political representation of the borough’s minority ethnic communities.

There seem to be two assumptions in this statement. The first is that there aren’t enough ethnic minority councillors (hereafter “ME”) and the second that the ethnic composition of the council actually matters.

So, is Sutton Council too white, and if so, what would be an acceptable number of ME councillors? I don’t think it’s my job to allocate specific councillors into ethnic categories but I expect that the council does this, whether by self-reporting or otherwise. Nonetheless, you can take a look at the current list of 54 councillors and judge for yourself. They do look predominantly white to me.

At what point does this predominantly white council become too white? If the question is meaningful at all it must be possible to quantify the matter. The usual approach to “under-representation” is to consider the chosen ones in the context of the pool from which they are chosen. Sutton had just over 10% ME residents in the 2001 census and it’s estimated that there are now around 13% ME people living in the borough. Should we assume that it is unacceptable for there to be fewer than 13% ME councillors, as seems to be the case at present? If so, what if there were more than 13% ME councillors? Would we then have a problem of white people being under-represented? Could we expect to see council-funded projects “particularly hoping to attract interest from Sutton’s white community”?

Why stop with treating all ME people as a homogeneous group? We might be able to approximately hit just the “right” amount of ME councillors but then find that people from Chinese backgrounds are hogging seats that really should go to Black Africans. Is this all about skin colour or should White Irish and White Other Europeans get a look-in too? What’s their representation like?

And of course, why stop with ethnicity? Plenty of other social groups could make a claim for better representation on the council. There appear to be 17 women on the council or around 31%, far below the number of women in the population which is just over 50%. Women appear to be at least as far behind as MEs in representation — why isn’t a women’s group running this project expressing “particular hope” in getting more women on board? How would we go about getting just the right number of councillors from all these groups (some of which overlap) simultaneously?

If you’ve already switched off by now, you’ll probably have this down as yet another exercise in lambasting “political correctness” through the exploration of a supposed white (male) victimology. So I should be very clear about this: Discrimination is real, it is bad and it should be tackled effectively. But the root of discrimination is the false perception of significant difference and that’s very much what it looks like is happening with projects like this in a place like Sutton. Situations elsewhere may be different, of course.

Why should anyone care about the ethnic origin of their councillor or indeed, the council as a whole, in a place like Sutton in 2009? Is it right to assume that a white councillor here cannot represent a black resident? Is it right to assume that a black councillor here cannot represent a white resident? Should we assume that just because a body of councillors doesn’t appear to be representative of the population in terms of ethnicity, that the population is in fact not represented by them adequately? This isn’t 1930s Alabama or contemporary Barnsley or Barking. Do our 31 LibDems, 21 Tories and two independents harbour a significant number of closet racists?

If this is an issue in practice then I’ll be the first to want to do something about it. Local councillors serve a dual role. In no particular order, they represent their parties on the council and work to advance their parties’ political programmes. They also represent the constituents of their wards and often act in a non-partisan way to ensure that their constituents’ voices are heard and their personal issues with the council are settled. In my experience, local councillors generally do a good job.

To seek to increase the number of ME councillors is really implying one of two things, neither of which are very complimentary. Either the white councillors really aren’t representing their ME constituents adequately. I suspect and I hope this isn’t true. Alternatively, perhaps it’s the case that ME residents feel that they don’t want to be represented by white councillors, no matter how good a job they may try to do. I suspect and hope that this, too, isn’t true. But if there is racism among Sutton’s councillors or in the wider community, why don’t we deal with it rather than assuming that the problem lies with the ethnic composition of the council?

It’s great that Sutton Council is giving local people a chance to find out more about becoming a councillor. I’d be happy to see anyone from any background stand as a candidate for the party of their choice, or as an independent. But the single biggest impediment to large numbers of people getting elected as councillors is not supporting either the Conservative or Liberal Democrat parties, being the only parties which managed to get councillors elected at the last full council election. If you want to pretty much guarantee failure at the ballot box and exclusion from elected office in Sutton, stand for Labour, the Greens, UKIP, the BNP or yourself. It won’t be your ethnic background that sees you left out in the cold but your politics. That’s where a real and significant lack of diversity on the council is clearly evident.

Of all the differences that one could discern between people, ethnic origin in a place like Sutton is one of the least significant. Most ME people here have either been born in Britain (often to parents that were themselves born here) or have lived here so long that their cultural frame of reference is as much British as mine. The council should act against discrimination where it finds it but should also be absolutely scrupulous about not making even the very subtle implied insinuations of discrimination or unfair treatment where none appear to exist. There is enough real misery in society without having to contrive more — and allocate public money to its supposed amelioration.

We should work towards having a community not where the composition of the council is “sufficiently diverse” (whatever that might mean in practice) but where people of all backgrounds (and not just all ethnic backgrounds) feel well represented by their councillors, whoever they may be. It matters what councillors do, not who they are. If the Shadow Councillor Scheme runs again next year, let’s have it organised by a neutral group rather than a sectional interest one and make it clear that absolutely everyone is not just welcome, but equally welcome.

I welcome your own perspectives and experiences in the comments below.

(Click on the image to download the PDF, 19KB, opens in new window/tab.)

Like this? Follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/adrianshort

I’m a self-confessed and unashamed news junkie and this is how I’m starting to mash up news in my local area. For those that aren’t local, Sutton is a London borough with a population of approximately 180,000. Stonecot Hill is a neighbourhood within Sutton with a population of a few thousand.

Here’s how it all works.

Sources (green boxes)

I write Stonecot Hill News which is a local news blog running as a standalone WordPress installation on its own server. It produces an RSS 2.0 feed which here is treated as an outbound API.

Paul Burstow is the local member of parliament (constituency: Sutton & Cheam). Paul posts news regularly to his website and for many years that site has been serving an RSS 1.0 (RDF) feed. Whether he realises it or not, Paul laid one of the first foundations for news mashability in the borough.

The Sutton Guardian is the local newspaper, published by Newsquest. Together with its sister titles in other areas, they publish several dozen RSS 2.0 feeds for a wide variety of content.

Sutton Council is the local authority for the borough. Despite a recent £270,000 revamp to their website they haven’t yet managed to step into the Twenty-First and produce any RSS feeds. However, they do publish a variety of content regularly on their website, including their press releases.

APIs (grey boxes)

For the non-technical: API stands for Application Programming Interface, but that doesn’t tell you very much. Think of APIs like connectors or adapters that allow one program to plug into another in the same way that our household appliances can all connect to the electrical network because they share common plugs and sockets.

An API may be inbound (allowing data to be put into an application), outbound (allowing data to be extracted) or both.

As we can see in the diagram, applications which use APIs can be daisy-chained together, with the output of one application being fed into another.

RSS and Atom feeds are also APIs in that they provide a structured way for a program to get data out of an application. These feed formats are simple to implement (many applications produce them automatically) and are the first thing to consider when implementing a simple outbound API for an application.

Mashers (pink boxes)

Mashers are small programs that connect otherwise incompatible inbound and outbound APIs together. TwitterFeed is a simple example. Say you want to automatically post the new items from your blog to your Twitter account. Your blog serves an RSS feed but Twitter, while it has an inbound API, cannot accept RSS directly as input. TwitterFeed links the two, allowing the user to define any number of RSS feeds as inputs and any number of Twitter accounts as outputs, via the Twitter API. In this way, TwitterFeed plugs blogs into Twitter.

Yahoo! Pipes is a much more sophisticated and flexible masher. It can take inputs from a variety of sources (RSS, Atom, CSV, Flickr API, Google Base or even raw web pages), sort, filter and combine them in every conceivable way, and output the results as a single stream in various formats (RSS, JSON, and KML, the geo-format used by Google Earth). For my mashup I created this pipe to filter Paul Burstow’s, the Sutton Guardian’s and Sutton Council’s news and only pass through items containing the word “stonecot” to the stream that eventually ends in the @stonecothill Twitter feed, which is just for Stonecot Hill residents. The number of items coming through these sources about Stonecot Hill is very low, but when something appears residents will want to see it. (By way of example, only a single press release from Sutton Council in the last 227 concerns the Stonecot Hill area specifically.)

As mentioned above, Sutton Council doesn’t provide an RSS feed or any other kind of outbound API for its press release. I wrote a screen scraper in Ruby (using Hpricot) that grabs the press releases directly from the council website, dumps them into a MySQL database and pushes new items into the Delicious API. I’ve used Delicious here for two reasons. Firstly, because it generates an RSS feed automatically from all the items posted to it, so I can easily connect this output to other mashers and APIs further downstream without having to generate and host an RSS feed myself. Also, Delicious provides a useful search facility on its website allowing me to easily search just the press releases from Sutton Council. This isn’t possible with the council’s own website, where searches are scoped to the entire site.

Destinations (orange boxes)

In my diagram, the destinations are sites and services which represent new ways of consuming information coming from the original sources. Don’t want to read Sutton Council’s press releases on their own website? You can folllow them in Delicious or on Twitter. Want to keep up with the latest news about Stonecot Hill? Again, the @stonecothill Twitter account can find this for you from various sources. I also add my own items to @stonecothill, making it a unique mashup of original and syndicated content that’s highly targeted and very local.

The information stream doesn’t need to end with these destinations. Any destination that provides an outbound API can simply be another link in the chain to downstream services. In my diagram, the RSS feed from Delicious is used to do just that, pushing all its content on to the @suttonboro Twitter account, and just the Stonecot Hill-related content on to the @stonecothill account via the Yahoo! Pipes filter. Twitter has its own specific outbound API and also serves RSS feeds. There’s nothing to stop anyone else building on these destinations by combining and filtering them with other sources to produce their own unique, relevant information streams that they find useful.

What next?

If you run a website, it’s time to start thinking of mashability with the same degree of seriousness as you treat human visitors. Your website needs to serve up feeds and APIs so that other programs can connect to your content and deliver it to people in ways and contexts that they find useful. Some of these may have an audience of thousands or even millions. Others may have an audience of one. Regardless, by providing an API to your content you enable others to build things that you haven’t imagined, don’t have the resources or desire to build yourself, and won’t have to maintain. Businesses like newspapers that survive by selling their content (or selling advertising around their content) are thinking very carefully about the challenges and opportunities for the future of their industries. For government and voluntary organisations, it’s time to start thinking more like evangelists than economists. Spread the word like the free Bibles in hotel bedrooms and take every opportunity to get your message out there.

Sutton Council have been encouraged in various ways to implement feeds on their own website and the song will remain the same until they do. I don’t want to maintain my scraper for ever and I certainly don’t want to build any more of them.

The whole API and mashability agenda is far bigger than simple web feed formats like RSS and Atom. It’s time for technologists to stop flogging the line that “RSS is an easy way for people who follow lots of websites to read all their news in one place”. Direct human consumption of RSS feeds is never going to hit the mainstream in that way. If you’re reading this, you’re far more likely that average to use an RSS reader. (I’ve got 86 feeds in my Google Reader right now). The average web user has barely heard of the concept and most definitely don’t do it. I suspect they never will. But it’s likely they’re already benefiting from syndicated content through sites and applications that they use. If they never have to see or care about the underlying technology that’s really no more a problem than worrying that the average web user doesn’t understand HTTP or DNS. It’s just plumbing that can stay out of sight and out of mind as long as it works.

For the minority that do use personal RSS readers, I’d like to see more of them with built-in filtering features. Setting a simple keyword filter on a feed makes RSS reading considerably more powerful.

For those serving up feeds, I’d like to see Atom more widely used. Without wanting to open a can of Wineresque worms, RSS 2.0 fudges a number of important issues around content semantics and provides no support whatsoever for correctly attributing items in feeds mashed from several sources. Atom was designed to solve these problems and it does. Let’s use it.

Lastly, mashability is about every conceivable kind of content and content type. It’s not just about news and text. Every stream of information should have its own machine-readable feed. Every system that can accept data from human input should implement an inbound API to do likewise. To take one example, FixMyStreet is a website for people to report street faults to local authorities and currently takes around 1000 reports a week. It even has its own iPhone application so people can report faults complete with GPS locations and photos directly from the street. Only a single local authority in over 400 has implemented an inbound API to receive these reports. The rest get them by email, which must be manually copied into their own databases with all the effort, expense, possibility for error and opportunity costs that represents. Third-parties building extensions to other people’s systems is no longer unusual, so organisations need to embrace the possibilities rather than fighting against it or standing around looking bemused.

It’s time to open the doors and windows and get the web joined up, mashed up and moving.

1. No distinct link colours, no visited link colours.

I’ve read half of these stories, but which ones?

Two of the web’s strongest conventions are to use different colours for links and body text, and to use different colours for visited and unvisited links. Ignore them at your peril.

Links need to stand out from body text so they’re easily visible at a glance, not just on closer scrutiny. The usual method is to use a contrasting colour for the links and to underline them. The underlining can be dropped in obvious groups of links such as navigation bars and at a push in body text. A different colour is pretty much mandatory. If you’ve got links, why camouflage them?

Using a different colour for visited links is all but essential so that the user can easily see which links they’ve used and which they haven’t. The more links a page has, the more important this becomes. Again, it’s effectively a mandatory usability requirement and so widespread it’s ubiquitous. Not using different colours for visited links is one of Jakob Nielsen’s Top 10 Mistakes in Web Design.

On Sutton Council’s new site, the body text is black, the links are black and underlined and the visited links are black and underlined. Spot the difference? Clearly, badly-conceived ideas about graphic design have taken precedence over the convenience and sanity of the poor souls that might actually have to plough through some of the site’s several hundred pages. Or maybe the designers have short-term memories that can hold twenty or thirty items. Who knows?

2. The Clock/Calendar anti-pattern

Perhaps I’m not really in the target audience, but when I want to know the time or the date my first instinct isn’t to visit Sutton Council’s website. Right now I can see the time in three different places (watch, wall clock, taskbar) and finding the date requires no more effort than hovering my mouse over the clock in the corner of my screen.

Putting the current date and time in a web page is rarely necessary and often confuses. Aside from the obvious cost of cluttering the page with something that just doesn’t belong there, it can lull the user into a false sense of contemporaneity. Hey, this site is bang up to date! Just like the clock on my wall!

Sadly, the current date on a web page is often mistaken for the publication date of the web page itself. This is a problem as I hazard to suggest that very little of Sutton Council’s web content has been published within the last minute. It would be all too easy to see that date as being relevant to an otherwise undated news article or press release.

Dumping the current date and time into a web page is a shoddy anti-pattern that needs to stop. It’s a bad habit picked up by lousy designers (or lousy clients) who presumably feel that it’ll liven up an otherwise pedestrian site. If it’s not contextual it’s clutter, so leave it out.

Incidentally, given that the council’s PR department ploughs through nearly £600,000 a year, it’s worth asking whether we can get dated press releases and news articles for that money or will we have to stump up a bit more. What’s it worth?

3. Teeny text

Is it just me getting old or is the text just a tad too small? Yes, there are gratuitous “accessibility” widgets at the top of every page to adjust it, but a better approach might well have been to make it a bit bigger by default. Not everyone on the web is a 20-something 1337 h4x0rz.

Help is at hand!

Better Sutton Council is a Greasemonkey script I’ve written to fix these problems and enable colourful, legible and bad-date-free browsing.

How to get it:

1. You must be using the Firefox browser. No Internet Explorer, Opera, Chrome or what have you.

2. Install the Greasemonkey add-on if you don’t already have it. You’ll probably know about it if you do.

3. Install Better Sutton Council as a user script and if necessary, activate Greasemonkey by clicking on the greyed-out sad monkey face on the status bar at the bottom of your browser window. Once the monkey face is smiling happy and colourful, you should be ready to go.

4. Just refresh/reload/visit Sutton Council and enjoy a whole new way of browsing.

A couple of important points:

• I haven’t been bothered to track down the exceptions to the default link colours I’ve defined for darker backgrounds. My aim is to make the site more legible and usable, not to improve its overall prettiness. If you’re expecting a comprehensive redesign you’ll be disappointed.
• This “hack” operates purely in the user’s browser within a well-managed script framework for modifying downloaded web pages before they’re displayed. At no point have I compromised Sutton Council’s security or created any vulnerability on anyone’s computers. Don’t embarrass yourself by trying to McKinnon me: I haven’t done anything worse than the web equivalent of colouring my daily newspaper with crayons.

The software’s in the public domain. Modify to taste if you know how. If not, just enjoy it as it is or uninstall through Manage User Scripts on the Greasemonkey menu (right-click on the monkey face).

That’s better.

Sutton Council launched their long-awaited new website this week and it’s disappointingly dreadful in many ways. Possibly worse than anything in the design or content of the site is the sad fact that the new design has broken all the inbound links to the site, just like it did the last time and the time before that.

What does this mean, why does it matter and what can be done about it?

Links are the lifeblood of the web. Most of the time, we take for granted that we can click on links and arrive at the pages we were expecting. Nothing is more fundamental to the good operation of the web overall and individual sites than links working and continuing to work.

Now imagine a large organisation with several thousand workers. The organisation has a switchboard system and each worker has their own extension number which is available internally and externally. You are tasked with upgrading the switchboard system to a newer model or a different model from another supplier. You can imagine the chaos and costs that would be caused if the new switchboard system required that all the internal extension numbers had to be changed, so your first concern is to ensure that the handover from the old system to the new is seamless and transparent. The old numbers continue to work in the new system as everyone would properly expect. No-one would be so stupid as to expect to have to change all the staff’s phone numbers just because you’re upgrading the switchboard.

The web is no different. Instead of phone extensions, a website has pages and each page has its own address (which we call URLs). We get to a page by knowing its address or clicking on a link that encodes that address, in just the same way that we reach a person via their phone number.

Many bad things happen when a page that used to be at:

http://www.sutton.gov.uk/news/latest/Lottery-winning+library+set+for+rebuild.htm

suddenly moves to:

http://www.sutton.gov.uk/index.aspx?articleid=3531.

The most obvious effect is that clicking on the first link no longer works. You end up on an error page.

These links could be in several different places:

• within your own website
• on other people’s websites, including search engines like Google
• in your own staff’s bookmarks/favourites
• in other people’s bookmarks/favourites
• in RSS feeds
• in emails
• in Word, Excel and PDF documents
• in databases
• in calendar systems
• printed on paper on reports, posters, leaflets and other documents

Changing all the URLs of all the web pages on your site means imposing considerable direct and indirect costs on your organisation and on every individual and organisation that deals with you.

People who run websites incur the direct costs of having to change all their links to your site so that they still work. I run Sutton Active and Suttonboro which between them include dozens of links to various pages within the council website. Or at least, they did. It will be several hours work to fix them all so that, say, the link on this page about Ridge Road Library back to Sutton Council’s site works again. (Depending on when you’re reading this, this may now be fixed.) That’s time that would be far better spent improving my own site than covering up for the deficiencies in others’, and until I do it, my own site is both less useful and appears broken, reflecting badly on me. So, find the direct costs by multiplying the number of inbound links to the council’s site by the time spent to fix them. There could be hundreds or even thousands of these and most of them will have to be fixed manually.

The indirect costs are harder to calculate but are most probably far greater. These are the cost incurred when someone clicks on a link to a page within the council’s site and it doesn’t work. They just get an error page. They will then either have to search or browse for the correct page within the council’s site or they’ll go away without being able to read what they were expecting and gaining the benefits from doing so. The cost in terms of time, frustration and missed opportunities could be huge.

This is particularly serious because it affects Google and other search engines. Try searching for sutton council recycling and clicking on the link provided by Google. It’s broken, as are all the other links from search engines. It could be several weeks before the search engines rebuild their links correctly. At least for them it’s an automated process, but it’s little help to web users in the meantime.

The worst thing about the whole sorry mess is that this problem is well understood among web designers and the tools and techniques for avoiding or fixing it are widely and cheaply available. Designers call the problem linkrot and the solution, permalinks — that is, permanent links. Web usability expert Jakob Neilsen wrote about linkrot (and coined the term) in 1998 — a decade ago! — and the term has its own Wikipedia page and an estimated 60,000+ references online. Yet here is Sutton Council repeatedly breaking its connections to the rest of the web with every new website redesign as if it were blithely unaware that it’s even an issue.

I even wrote to the council about this on 15 August:

The last time the council redesigned its website (two years ago?) it cost me about three hours’ work as I had to fix all the links to various council pages on my various sites. I assume that the new design will break all these links again and that I and everyone else who links to your site will have to bear similar costs. Techniques for “permalinking” (creating web page addresses that are effectively permanent) are now well understood and widely used. I hope that your new website will use them and that the council won’t keep breaking everyone else’s outbound links with every new redesign after the one currently in progress.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permalink

and volunteered my time for nothing as a tester for the new site but have as yet had no substantial reply. Bit late now, really.

So how do we break out of this cycle of broken links every time we upgrade the website or move to a new content management system? Let’s look at permalinks.

Just in aesthetic terms, which of these looks better?

www.sutton.gov.uk/environment/recycling

or

www.sutton.gov.uk/index.aspx?articleid=691

The second link is actually the one that currently works.

I hope most people would prefer the first. And that’s handy, because not only does it read better for humans but because the link itself is meaningful and independent of any system or technology, it can always serve as the address of the recycling page for as long as it exists (and implicitly, lives within the environment section of the website).

Being “independent of any system or technology” is also important. Web technology changes all the time. Every year there are new content management systems (the specialised databases that run large websites) and even whole new underlying server systems. If we know one thing for certain it’s that we won’t necessarily be using today’s technology in a year’s time, let alone five years or ten years. To tie our web addresses tightly to the underlying technology is a mistake. In the link structure above, the address is specific both to the particulary content management system and to the web server system on which it runs. (In detail, the server is running ASP.NET which is where the aspx comes from. While making no criticism of ASP.NET, do you really want to be tied to it forever? Will it even be around in a few years?)

Even if a system isn’t going to provide meaningful names for the URLs of its pages, it can still construct simple permalinks that are independent of the content management system and the server technology:

www.sutton.gov.uk/page/691

works, as indeed does the date-based system on my own blog site here. It’s less pretty, but at least we can be reasonably sure that we could transparently move the site from one system to another without it forcing us to change the address style and break all the inbound links in the process.

In 2008, almost the only excuse for breaking all one’s links is to move from a legacy non-permalinked system to a permalinked one. You (and others) will go through the pain and expense of breaking those links but at least it will be the last time you’ll (forseeably) have to do it. Had Sutton Council moved to permalinks in this new redesign, I still wouldn’t relish the task of updating all their links but at least I’d be happy that this would be the last time I’d have to do it. (It’s 99% likely I wouldn’t have written this blog post either.) As it is, I’m asking, how many more times is this going to happen before someone at the council understands the issue and actually does something about it?

Sutton Council has externalised the cost of its poor web design onto the rest of the community. Thanks a bunch, not least because we’re paying for the site in the first place. Here’s looking forward to 2010′s redesign, when there’s just a glimmer of hope that we won’t have to go through this whole sorry farce for about the fourth time.

Stop breaking the web every time you upgrade your website.

Some questions for whoever commissioned the website:

• Were you aware that linkrot is a serious issue?
• Did you look for a content management system that supports permalinks to address that issue?
• Does your content management system support permalinks?
• If so, why aren’t you using them?
• If not, why didn’t you get one that does?
• How many 404 Not Found errors did you get in the week before launching the new site and in the week after?
• Do you have any plans to address this issue now or in the future?
• Will the next redesign perpetuate this problem or fix it?

1. Sutton Council’s Latest News section doesn’t have an RSS feed or any easy way for the public to track it other than by visiting it regularly.

2. The Sutton Guardian has more dirt than diamonds (although at least it has a feed).

3. Other things happen that don’t get reported.

4. You don’t have time to plough through two dozen websites to keep track of what’s going on in Sutton.

Solutions:

1. Visit http://twitter.com/suttonboro for a concise, well-edited overview of borough activity.

2. If you use an RSS reader, subscribe to the feed at http://feeds.feedburner.com/suttonboro

3. Subscribe to the latest updates by email, if that’s your thing.

Enjoy.