Everyone knows government sites are the cash cows of the Irish web industry. They’re also, by far, amongst the worst in the country.
My favourites
Here’s a list of some of my favourite bad government or government-funded web sites. Thanks to one of Ireland’s top usability gurus — who shall remain nameless because his company is currently milking one of these cash cows — for helping me compile this list.
- Dublin.ie; funded by the Department of Environment
and Dublin City Council but sporting Google ads? - Lotto; “hello marquee, 1995 called , it misses you”.
- Garda Síochána Ombudsman Commission by Artefact, using table technology.
- HSE, “also available with a smaller font size”, love the tables here too.
- Courts Service of Ireland; with the most schizophrenic layout I’ve see in a long time.
- Department of Transport; horrible site and ironically very slow.
- Department of Education; I have no smart comment for this one, only shame.
- BASIS, with a completely mental IA; it’s like getting stuck in a house of mirrors.
- Official Garda Website; I like the way this one brings back that interactive CD-ROM nostalgia.
Your favourites?
Post up any government sites you think need need more than a polish and also if you know who’s responsible for any of the sites above; surprisingly, it seems these “web designers” didn’t want credit for their work!
26 Comments
Houses of the Oireachtas - just beautiful!
Posted by John Ryan at 2:36 pm on 4 February, 2008.
Huge fan of the “web-friendly” image used on the Garda website. Here’s the image used on the new visitors page, which is displayed at 175×214.
http://www.garda.ie/images/commissionermurphy.jpg
Posted by David Barrett at 2:48 pm on 4 February, 2008.
Holy crap, that’s 4961×6066px!
Posted by David Barrett at 2:53 pm on 4 February, 2008.
“Welcome to the Garda Síochána Website. We do hope that you like it.”
Christ on a bike… That one has to be the worst. This is our national police service for crying out loud! Unbelievable.
I’d suggest that it must have been made by Commissioner Murphy’s 12 year old nephew, but I don’t know the guy and wouldn’t want to risk getting in trouble for such slanderous remarks.
Posted by Michael Flanagan at 2:56 pm on 4 February, 2008.
The Garda website is still completely unnavigable in anything other that IE thanks to a inexplicable use of proprietary Javascript for the navigation.
That really, really annoys me!
Posted by Ciaran at 3:23 pm on 4 February, 2008.
i wonder if i can get some tips on how they can make such ugly sites?
Posted by Dave Redfern at 3:40 pm on 4 February, 2008.
Awesome collection! Made me laugh. I have a good few Northern Irish ones I’ll share them soon.
Posted by David Rice at 4:19 pm on 4 February, 2008.
Hi Eoin. As I mentioned on Twitter, I’m the lead tech person for dublin.ie. Unfortunately, I’m out of the office today but I will post up our reasoning behind the Google Ads tomorrow when I’ve talked with the Project Manager.
Posted by Anthony Mc Guinness at 8:14 pm on 4 February, 2008.
Hi Eoghan,
I’d like to give you a background to dublin.ie’s use of Google Adsense over the past couple of years.
Primary funding for the version 1 of dublin.ie was provided by the Department of the Environment in 2002. The funding was used to further develop a new version of the site in 2005/2006 with the site you see now going live in September 2006. The site’s aim is to be a community portal for the city providing information for both residents and visitors to Dublin. Following the new development, funding from the DOE was exhausted and while Dublin City Council covered associated salary and server costs, expenses such as software updates and design work were not accounted for. It was at this time that we made the decision to install Google Adsense. While I cannot give you exact figures, the funds raised from the ads have covered various software upgrades (vBulletin, helpdesk software, email system etc) for us.
Dublin City Council, for the fiscal year 2008, has allocated funding for dublin.ie that will cover our development and software expenses. With that in mind we are currently evaluating the need for the ads and will be making a decision this week. We do appreciate feedback on the site, so if you (or any of your readers) have anything further, please feel free to send it on to anthony [dot] mcguinness [at] dublincity [dot] ie
Posted by Anthony Mc Guinness at 10:04 am on 5 February, 2008.
http://www.revenue.ie/ - frames.
btw it’s great to see someone respond in an official capacity to a criticism in such a professional manner.
Posted by Stewart Curry at 10:30 am on 5 February, 2008.
The Garda site really is terrible, isn’t it? One can only hope that the lack of professionalism broadcast like this to the world is not a reflection of any such lack within the force…
Posted by Eoghan McCabe at 11:11 am on 5 February, 2008.
Anthony, thanks a million for taking time to respond.
My immediate thoughts are these: If you need the AdWords revenue, you need the AdWords revenue and you’re left with no choice. This is fair enough. But considering the purpose of the site, as you just outlined, Dublin City and other relevant bodies really should be coughing-up what little you’ll make from ads. But I understand this is out of your control. What I would say is that if things have changed and you no longer need the ad revenue, get rid of them! Ads degrade the usability of a site and reduce the amount by which a person can trust its content. If I was a potential visitor to Dublin, I’d have to question the reliability of the information because a site with ads is usually a site with a commercial agenda.
Posted by Eoghan McCabe at 11:14 am on 5 February, 2008.
The citizen’s information site is one of the best sites in Ireland. They moved to tables & XHTML very early on, and do some clever things with language stuff. They’re also excellent at getting back to you if you make a comment on their feedback form, and fix errors quickly.
I thought OASIS was a snappier URL, but the site is still excellent:
http://www.citizensinformation.ie/
Posted by Kevin Cannon at 1:19 pm on 5 February, 2008.
http://www.makeitsecure.ie is still a decent effort of a Govt. sponsored site.
It’s just brochureware but a couple of years on and it doesn’t look/work so bad.
The very first year this initiative was launched, the site was hacked in days.
Posted by Chris Jess at 2:41 pm on 5 February, 2008.
i think that ads have gone from dublin.ie
looks like these comments actually did something! - although now the page doesn’t centre properly 
Posted by Dave Redfern at 6:59 pm on 5 February, 2008.
Hi Eoghan. As Dave has spotted, the ads have indeed come down. The reasons are essentially what I set out above. We’re looking at a better balance for the site in the long term and hope to make use of experts within the web field in Ireland.
Posted by Anthony Mc Guinness at 11:19 am on 6 February, 2008.
That’s a fantastic response and openness from Anthony. [Claps]
I hope this isn’t too off topic as it’s not a government site - but I’ve just been in contact with the soon to be launched ‘Ireland’s Green Pages’:
http://www.greenpages.ie/
Sliced images and tables for an entire home page… in 2008! I care because I’m passionate about sustainability and want to see the site do well.
Posted by Tom Atkins at 1:01 pm on 6 February, 2008.
This my current fav: http://www.defence.ie/website.nsf/home+page?openform
An enticing image of Willie to make you feel at home and some wonderfully schizophrenic text alignments and line lengths.
Posted by Dave Hall at 10:32 pm on 6 February, 2008.
dublin.ie has always been a poor site, it nevers appear properly in my browsers, very cobbled together.
the gov does have some excellent sites, particularily for mapping etc
http://www.gis.ie, http://www.npws.ie the floodmapping site, archaeology.ie smartmaps, to have extensives OS and aerial map of ireland up on map is impressive.
citizen info is good although its links to forms aren’t uptodate
Posted by steve white at 6:39 pm on 8 February, 2008.
Eoghan this is one of the funniest posts I’ve seen in a while, brightened up my saturday. The Garda one is the funniest though. I never saw it before but seriously WTF? I hope no-one disables the frontpage extensions on them. I could have knocked that website out in a weekend and you know what my development skills are (basically none for everyone else).
Great laugh though as I haven’t seen half of those sites before. I can’t believe someone is getting paid anything but monopoly money to produce this crap.
Posted by Anton Mannering at 10:23 am on 9 February, 2008.
In relation to my comment above: I just spoke to the people at GreenPages and the current page is a holding page. The site will be different when launched. Apologies for any offence to the GreenPages staff.
Posted by Tom Atkins at 11:48 am on 9 February, 2008.
What about this one - not Irish but has to be the mother of all fcuked up websites…….
http://www.sncf.com
Posted by Mike at 10:44 am on 13 February, 2008.
How could you leave out the legendary http://www.buseireann.ie/ ?
Posted by Dave Jeffery at 12:31 pm on 15 February, 2008.
Try this on for size….www.letterkenny.ie
Its from the same people that developed, [desinged !] and run http://www.donegaldirect.ie. Yes, another overloaded pile, and both are trumpeted as being examples of great resources for tourists !
I give up
Posted by Name at 8:35 pm on 22 February, 2008.
Greenpages.ie should have been lauched in November 2007!
See:
http://www.corporatereputations.ie/news_item.php?id=28
I am quite annoyed as they took my money (over €250) for a Listing in September 2007 and I Still have NOTHING to show for it!
Is it a bad joke?
Posted by Zowark at 10:54 pm on 8 May, 2008.
http://www.checktheregister.ie/ pains me
Posted by Oisin Prendiville at 12:38 pm on 19 May, 2008.
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