Stop press: Government builds awful website!

08 Jul 2009

The Government of New South Wales, Australia’s largest state and economy and home to over half a million ASIC registered businesses, has recently failed on the web front. This is not the norm, hence my writing about it.

Their website, License.NSW, currently offers only business name registration services as of this new financial year (July 1st in Australia), while all other licensing types that it used to provide for have been moved to the rather attractive new website, NSW Government Licensing Service. Both are purportedly operated by the Department of Fair Trading. Domain name confusion aside, the upgrading of all licensing types except for the one most useful to the bulk of NSW citizens is bizarre.

Consider that figure of the ASIC registered companies alone — that excludes all non-incorporated businesses in NSW — and divide by the three years for which their NSW business name registration is valid. There are over 160,000 individuals using the old website every year, or about 450 transactions a day.

As a general rule, Governments in Australia do an excellent job of at least attempting to provide a good web presence. Our federal government has setup as part of (ironically) the Department of Finance and Deregulation regulations for Web Publishing, and recently launched Government 2.0 Taskforce (taking much from recent developments in the United States particularly) — they’re not clueless.

That’s why it’s doubly disappointing to see bad policy decisions impacting technology rollout. Back in 2003, when the first License.NSW site was launched, business name registration was the first service to go live. Now, for whatever reason, it is the last and only service not yet integrated into a NSW-wide, inter-departmental licensing system.

Notably, the new website states a capacity target of December 2009 of 250 people online simultaneously. Managing 1.7 million licenses (most of these annual) across a variety of license types should require a capacity of less than 200 simultaneous users/hour. In light of the fact that they are hoping only for 25% use of the service over offline means, and that figure drops to a meagre 50 simultaneous sessions. Even accepting usage at peak times of the day and (financial) year, it’s probably not a question of capacity, even including the additional 450 transactions a day business name licensing would contribute.

At the very least, assuming it takes only ten minutes to process each additional application manually (fairly generous, I think!), the savings of around ten full time employees required to manually keep on top of things should pay for the systems development cost! Assuming employees only cost $50,000/year each (conservative considering compulsory 9% superannuation in Australia, plus office space, leave entitlements, etc.), if only a quarter of users register online that’s a recurring saving of $250,000. If I ran the Department of Fair Trading, I’d be giving whoever runs the licensing side of things a pretty big kick up the backside to spend at least that amount to get more people registering online. It WILL pay for itself — particularly seeing how this part of your Department operates on a user-pays system. Currently, offline registration comes in at $152, generating at least $24 million in revenue annually. If you can kill the offline processing costs and keep the bulk of that revenue — or reduce costs and stimulate innovation and investment in NSW — it would surely be irresponsible not to.

As a user and tax-payer, therefore, I demand change here.

At present, the hideousness of the website and the half-half state of online license registration and renewal in NSW is a pretty large disincentive. As for change management, for a service people return to use once every three years, there’s no great need for concern over keeping users on board. You’ll have totally forgotten how it “used to” work by the next time you need to use it: this suggests that any resistance is purely internal.

Here’s the reason for noticing this at all: it’s not the norm. In general, Government in Australia actually does an excellent job of producing websites. There are good, clear guidelines developed by intelligent, well-respected web practitioners, and, when these are heeded the results are globally of a high standard.

Additionally, it grates when all the clichéd stereotypes about glacial public services are revealed to be true: it’s not as though this is a project of minor benefit, or for which there is no obvious financial benefit. Just do it. If you’re seeking a vendor to make it happen, use the NSW Government’s efficient eTendering service… or send me a message once I’ve jumped through the hoops and registered this new business name & associated company!

Only half-joking.

New EvolvedHD website: appropriately widescreen!

08 Jul 2009

My friends over at EvolvedHD just launched a new website for their burgeoning event production empire down in Victoria. It’s a clear, clean microsite with a clear presentation of services offered and an effective call to action with contact information prominently featured on every page (there are only four!)

Notably, the site is very wide (>1200px). As the web evolves we are observing an ever increasing standard width for desktop versions of websites — for some, this poses current issues as individuals gradually shift to widescreen platforms. For others, it represents the inexorable march away from old technologies towards the new!

While this poses certain problems for mobile clients, etc., even these devices are increasingly capable of either linearising or providing useful interfaces (multi-touch, etc.) for making screen content accessible in mobile contexts. Here, the need for good information architecture cries out even louder than technical considerations. Browsing the Internet mobile is an arduous task on even mobile websites, so the best thing you can do as an author is reduce the necessary depth of content to make information rapidly accessible for all user agents.

In the case of the EvolvedHD website, the inclusion of contact details at the top left of every page effectively fulfills all likely applications of their website in a mobile context.

Consider more than just the desktop when designing your website. Increasingly, even low-depth websites are being called upon for mobile access as people seize the convenience of anywhere, anytime Internet. Stop making your users jump through hoops, and start giving them what they want, sooner. It’ll do wonders for your Internet-based business.

A lesson in brevity

08 Jul 2009

Continuing today’s observations about a small website, consider that web users read almost all of a page only if it is 25 words or less.

100% of you should’ve made it through the above: at least some of you stopped reading after the first sentence!

Pasting from Word into InDesign

06 Jul 2009

Bold/italic text is one of the few parts of Microsoft Word styling that designers actually lament the loss of when transferring content from Word into InDesign. Word styles are generally poorly used/abused, and accordingly the default is to throw them all out when importing text. Here’s how to avoid losing the baby with the bathwater.

In InDesign, press ⌘+K (Ctrl + K) to bring up the Preferences dialog, then click through to the last pane, “Clipboard Handling”. At the bottom of this pane, under “When Pasting Text and Tables from Other Applications”, set Paste to “All Information (Index Markers, Swatches, Styles, etc.)

Some Word styling will now import — watch carefully to make sure nothing too stupid finds its way into your pristine InDesign document!

SUEU Annual Conference ’09

05 Jul 2009

This week I had the privilege of joining six hundred others from a Christian student group at Sydney University for part of a week-long conference. I was meant to be there the whole week, and was pretty disappointed to find myself stuck in bed for a couple of days after “flu-like symptoms” descended on me Sunday evening! Still, made it up on Wednesday in time for the second half of the week. Rowan Kemp gave some great talks, explaining from the Bible who God is & why the Trinity is essential for understanding Him, how Christians are given a “deposit” or guarantee from God now as a sure sign of what is to come, and what “Spiritual gifts” are and their usefulness not just to individuals, but for the whole of God’s church. And plenty of other stuff, I’m sure!

I’d originally been going to help out leading a Focus (International Student) small group but for obvious reasons (i.e. the whole not arriving til Wednesday thing) this didn’t work out. Yin and Michael led the review group (based around the talk content) until on Thursday Yin got sick and, as many of the students had gone home (they were only attending part time), we combined the two Focus review groups into one. Phil and Anna served this group by exploring some of Christianity’s promises and claims: pray that God will use the material this group went over to continue to stir thoughts and point people to Christ as King and Saviour.

On Thursday night, Rowan shared a vision for the next 50-70 years of the lives of Christian people in that room, where by sustained prayer for many different ministries God might take the lives of many there for His purposes and glory throughout the world. It’s an exciting dream and one I want to prayerfully pursue for the rest of my life, thanking God for those who are passionate about so many different ways He gives us to serve and asking that we could do so more completely because of the Spirit now in us, making us more like Jesus.