Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport
It was reported in the Business Perthshire Magazine (not associated with)
that this website is no longer available and defaults to the Rolf Harris
website. We don't understand why the local business magazine should be making
ridiculous comments. The editor (Athole Fleming of Athole Design) then goes
on to accuse Perthshire Business of "losing their bottle", because it proclaims
this website is missing. *TRY A SEARCH ENGINE*
Uptime on this site has been 100%, serving web pages to upwards of 5,500 people from around the globe, daily for the last 14 weeks.
Possibly it's some sort of conspiracy theory attempting to convince local business that we no longer exist. This site is available on the first 4 pages of all major search engines. No5 on Google.jp Perhaps the magazine should check their facts before publishing misleading information.
We wish to thank Mr Fleming for his well educated and informed opinion and the extra traffic the editorial sent to this website.
We know you deceived us, now that's no surprise
It
is slowly emerging that the "best value practice" of Perth and Kinross council
has hidden costs for both the local economy and council tax payers. From
Wednesday 23rd of February 2005 onward Perth and Kinross council have announced
that, "the council is legally required to ensure that it secures value for
money and this means that for some projects the skills talent and expertise
of those who happen to be located outwith Perthshire are utilised."
The perthshire.com website went live on Friday the 25th of february. At the time of going live the website would not function properly with several common web browsers and the database backend of the site produced errors when searching for information. The site appeared not to have been properly tested/completed before hand over from the glasgow company that created the website.
At the time of the website going live the corporate communications department were asked if the website was fully functional and compliant with the European recommendations for a public authority website. The council representative assured local designers the site was fully functional and compliant with AA Bobby standard practices.
On the Saturday 16th of April both Perthshire.com and Perthshireg8.com were contacted and asked, Can you provide me with details of when perthshire.com/perthshireg8.com will be compliant with the current UK Disability Discrimination Act (DDA October 2004 amendments) and when it will be compliant with the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Priority 2 (October 1999). Minimum European standard for a local authority site is priority 2 AA WAG (October 1999).
The software engineer from the council replied for the perthshire.com website. "I can assure you that we take the accessibility aspect of our sites very seriously and I am fully cognizant of the bugs and errors in the XHTML that is breaking DDA compliance on www.perthshire.com. DDA and in turn XHTML compliance was part of our original project plan and we will honor that. Unfortunately we have had recent technical errors on the site that have taken precedence over fixing the XHTML output.
However, we have not been ignoring the problem and have employed www.abilitynet.org.uk to audit www.perthshire.com and are currently working to resolve code failures. I cannot give you a fixed timescale other than to say that I am currently working to resolve our site’s output to W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Priority 2 as per our project plan."
The perthshireg8.com webmaster has still to respond.
From the response given it can clearly be seen that "best value practice" has not delivered the most economical solution for the flagship website promoting Perthshire. The perthshire.com site was launched on the 25th of february and after 2 months is not fully functional or DDA compliant. Who is paying the bill for the additional work for a website that was claimed to be delived fully functional and AA Bobby standard compliant.
Other websites commissioned by Perth and Kinross council were also found to fall short of current quality standards.
