Wednesday, June 20, 2007

Miliband's new website b0rked!

Well that'll teach them! This morning, David Miliband and DEFRA sent out literally hundreds of press releases across the country with a personalised letter from David Miliband (they just changed the county in each one) to inform us all that the Government's new "carbon calculator" had gone live on the DirectGov web infrastructure.

There was loads of publicity, including the BBC, Sky News, the entire works in fact. There is of course one general rule when you go for such a "big bang" approach to a website launch. Make sure you load test the bloody thing first and get your metrics right! Right now, the site is, as we say in the business, b0rken.

Update: At least they're being honest about their failure to load test properly. You'd think the arse might tell the elbow to stop sending out press releases with "Miliband unveils CO2 calculator" as the title though.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

how much did this pile of s!*t cost us?

SimonW said...

Tried it this morning, opted for html instead of flash, painfully slow. I never did get as far as getting my carbon total.I lost the will to live answering the 16 screens about my house when I had to answer questions about insulation and DRAFT prevention. With that sort of error I decided the whole thing was flawed!

Anonymous said...

Server Error in '/' Application.
The resource cannot be found.
Description: HTTP 404. The resource you are looking for (or one of its dependencies) could have been removed, had its name changed, or is temporarily unavailable. Please review the following URL and make sure that it is spelled correctly.

Requested URL: /carboncalc/html/index.aspx

Version Information: Microsoft .NET Framework Version:2.0.50727.42; ASP.NET Version:2.0.50727.42


At least you got a graceful error.

Anonymous said...

Another IT success for NuLab!

Anonymous said...

Kin L

It's like wading thru treacle!

Why do they insist on doing these stupid things time after time?

Well done Dizzy for exposing yet another NuLab IT Cock up. Yet a little voice inside tells me that the other Politico parties would not do any better until Taxpayers money is not seen as easy come/ easy go.

Anonymous said...

To add to my anonymous above, I have now been told that my session has timed out.

I wonder if there is a site that will show my wasted CO2 footprint for a computer, monitor, modem, broadband connection and ISP link to a defunct internet site for at least 30 minutes.

Anonymous said...

And its a waste of money anyway, of course. Its not the global warming that'll get us. Its those africanised bees, man.