The Wardman Wire

Mike Rouse sets out his view on the decision to build the new Number 10 Downing Street website on Wordpress.

Use of Wordpress: Good

Whilst I am a big supporter of Number 10’s move to WordPress I share some reservations with Dizzy around security:

Not to mention, doing it in Wordpress is just silly. I’m
willing to bet that as soon as an exploit is found for the latest code
base someone hacks it and has great fun with it, because you can
guarantee that checking for updates and patching immediately will not
be the number one priority,

It’s also easy to get carried away with the “web 2.0″ phenomenon and lose sight of the fact that this is a serious part of Government and their website is an important outlet. Therefore, it is important that some basic levels of standards and performance are brought to bear. This is still our money that’s being spent, afterall.

Execution. Hmmm.

For starters, as Dizzy points out, the site fails accessibility guidelines. Then, I learn that The Register visited the site to find yet another issue:

The site is suffering from a few glitches - signing up for newsletters is not possible - and went down entirely yesterday. It clearly needs Gordo’s loving touch.

A few glitches?! It is unacceptable that the IT provider should allow even that to happen and totally unacceptable that the accessibility guidelines weren’t met. One eagle-eyed commenter on Dizzy Thinks even noted that meta tags still refer to Tony Blair as the PM:

Love that you can still find pages where the code says: meta name=”description” content=”10 Downing Street website, the official website of the British Prime Minister Tony Blair”.

The Devil, working with a company who does accessibility for a living, waded into the story, but takes a different view on the accessibility issue:

There are accessibility issues with the Number 10 website (a few of which I listed at Dizzy’s), but they are not particularly serious from an actual accessibility point of view (although there are problems under the rules which the government has passed).

The whole operation seems to have been sloppy. It looks like a quick attempt to look hip and trendy. I can only imagine the conversation:

“Gordon’s f*cking everything up at the moment. What can we do to earn some quick popularity points? How long has it been since we relaunched something? What’s that? The website hasn’t been done in a while? There’s a thought, but who’s going to actually do it - the people that know anything about this sh*t have all p*ssed off. WordPress? What the f*ck is that? Oh a trendy blogging engine you say? We can make it into our website can we? Even I can use it can I? Hey… Could Gordon even use it himself? Brilliant! We’ll have it!”

At least now when the ship that is 10 Downing Street is sat at the bottom of the wreckage that is the Government Gordon will still be able to do a spot of crazed blogging, probably at 6am and probably from a BlackBerry because he’s lost the keys to his office.

All that said, I do applaud any use of Open Source software. It’s brave for Downing Street to do it, but perhaps it should not have been a pioneer for the Government in this area. They should have set up a couple of smaller sites, let those take the flak for accessibility and security, see how they fared and then moved on to the bigger sites.

Wrapping Up

A number of people have commented on the blog of my good friend Iain Dale.

Basically, taking the technology aside, it’s an issue of procurement.

As Simon Dickson said in the comments on an earlier on The Rouseabout it’s a good move not to tie yourself in to a single supplier:

…there’s no lock-in to any particular supplier or contractor. It’s a
very astute move on numerous fronts.

I’m sure we’d like more of that throughout Government. In all, the technical operation was not good enough, but their heart is in the right place.