18 September - The Council sponsored website you’ve never heard of
I always suspected that agreeing to help the Abbey Wood Traders’ Association
(AWTA) would lead to mission creep and it shows every sign of doing so.
Fortunately others are organising a public meeting on Anti-Social Behaviour
and I need do nothing but it’s a little worrying that some people are saying there
is no ASB in Wilton Road. Of course it must depend on how it is defined.
Those of us who pass through Wilton Road daily are entirely used to seeing groups of noisy drinkers hanging around at the end of one of the alleys
but if they never actually harm passers by is that actually ASB? If only they
wouldn’t throw their empties into an adjacent garden.
Overall it is very disappointing that after investing £300,000 in
upgrading shop
fronts and more on the pubic realm both Councils appear to be losing interest.
Exposed drain pipes are falling apart,
a tree has had to be removed and no one
ever came back to fit the promised pavement studs that should mark where shop forecourts meet
the public highway.
Bexley Council seemed to be so keen on the project when it began, they issued
a Press Release, here’s part of it.
Note the bit about setting up an on-line directory.
I bet you haven’t ever seen it. Probably that’s because it
was given no publicity. Why wasn’t there a link in the Press Release?
www.yourabbeywood.co.uk which
provided the formal Council stuff was mentioned
but not www.abbeywoodvillage.co.uk
which might have been more useful to anyone planning a shopping expedition.
It was
mentioned on BiB but Googling anything about Abbey Wood draws a blank on ‘the village website’.
At the time I thought it was quite well done but it still talks about about the
January sales, Valentine’s Day and special offers that expired months ago.
Traders’ names are spelled wrongly and in one case pictures of the shop owners are transposed to
the wrong shop! Phone numbers are not consistently displayed and some directory pages put the text
alongside the images while others with near identical content put it
underneath. Obviously my first look at the site was far too superficial,
look hard and it soon reveals itself as a mess.
It would be unfair to apportion blame but for whatever reason requests to update pages have failed.
Despite taxpayers’ money going to some web developer somewhere,
under the bonnet it’s also a bit of a disaster. The image sizes are all over the place and at
some screen magnifications the navigation bar disappears and then shows up in a
different place; it had me fooled for a while.
It is quite possible that formal websites have had their day and are replaced
to some extent by Twitter and Facebook but nevertheless the AWTA would like to
have a website that can be advertised in every one of their shop windows. For
that the site needs to be easily kept up to date, so basically as simple as possible. The
Councils are sponsoring the current site only until the middle of next year when it will die if nothing is done.
Guess who has been given the job of saving it from oblivion?
As mentioned yesterday I have some new tricks to learn because in some ways
Bonkers is technically at least a bit dated (and probably too big to modify).
Things are going quite well but there is lots still to be done and websites can
always be improved. So that is why there will probably be no blogs for the next 48 hours.
With any luck BiB should be back after tomorrow’s Cabinet meeting.