Author: Simon Perry
IW Council Tells Everyone That iWight Website Did Well. But Did It?
10:53 am Friday, 15th January, 2010, Isle of Wight
ShortURL: http://wig.ht/28d1
Read More- Island-wide, Isle of Wight Council, News, Online, Opinion Piece
It’s with more than a little surprise that we received a press release from the Isle of Wight council a couple of days ago saying how well their iWight Website did during the ups and down of the snow disruption.
The common reaction we had heard was the exact opposite – that when people wanted to know what was going on with school or road closures, the iWight site couldn’t cope, and they were met with blank pages, rather than the information they needed to see.
Press Office frantically updating
We know that the information was being frantically updated onto the site by the Communications / Press Office team (Simon Butler and Anna Price should get a special mention) because we saw it flooding into us via email (as we couldn’t get access to the iWight site either).
iWight servers let us down
What let them and the Island down was the public just weren’t able to access the Website – perhaps because the servers couldn’t cope, or there just wasn’t enough bandwidth available to the servers. Either way, it’s clear that the proper planning hadn’t been made for high levels of Web traffic.
As Tim Hunter-Henderson, Cabinet member responsible for customer service and communications said, “The Internet is a very important tool for getting information out to the public, especially in times when residents want important news about their child’s school or information regarding which roads are clear.” Quite.
Good for us :)
This of course leads Island people to turn to other Websites to find out the vital information – which was great for us (and a big hello goes to our new readers on the Blog, Facebook and Twitter!) and for the “Emergency Information for the Isle of Wight” Facebook group that was setup to cover the problems.
What would happen in a real emergency?
It does make you wonder quite how the Island would have found out this information if other media sources hadn’t stepped up to the job and delivered it for the council. Or indeed, what would happen in a serious emergency.
Let’s hope the council learns from this experience and carries out the necessary upgrades.
Yes – I have to say, I gave up looking at the iWight website after the first day or two when it was taking the best part of 10-15 minutes to load… VentnorBlog however was always pretty responsive… would love to see the google analytics for the last 2 weeks! :-)
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The IW Council site was totally useless during the bad weather. The refuse collecting information was wrong (or just non-existent) for days and elsewhere on the site it made few references to the difficulties we were facing.
Definitely, the place to go for accurate and useful information was Ventnorblog. Thanks for providing such a great service!
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Your comments about the Isle of Wight councils website were interesting. I didn’t have any problems myself but I did find it was a little slower than normal, but i would have expected that due to the increase in traffic
My comment is for you guys, why do you not display a link to the page you are discussing
You are happy to slate their site, but you failed to give a link to their site. You should concentrate on improving your site before knocking others
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I’ve answered your query about the link further down the page, but would add that on the whole (despite the regular problems with the planning section), I personally believe that the iwight site is very good.
I use it regularly to access information and I like the new design (as illustrated by the praise given in this article last year).
I do however agree with Simon that the delivery of service last week really let the Web team down.
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To summarise Iwight’s performance, A* for effort, but C- for delivery of the website to Islanders. The content was great, but if you can’t get to it, it is a bit pointless!
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I understand how there is mixed opinion on the usability of iwight during the snow. Much of the time it was merely slower than normal, but at key times (for parents managing childcare especially) it was unusable. From 5pm Sunday, the publicised time from which school closure information would be available, the site was repeatedly reported unavailable, or appeared to time out without loading the whole page, e.g. mid table.
It was about 7pm before I could load from iwight.com.
VB was excellent. I did wonder how they got the info. e.g by email from the press office, or by mirror web. I also heard that someone with two PCs found that one set-up was better than the other (non Internet Explorer route was better – not sure if coincidence, or bandwidth/caching related).
Not sure if council are releasing spin, genuinely unaware, or if it’s lost in the stats. e.g. a Website may have a reported 99.9% availability per annum, but if the eight hours unavailability is when people need it, then it’s not a useful stat!!!
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Total rubbish, the website was down for days!
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Frankly, I gave up with Iwight and just used Ventnor Blog – without it, I wouldn’t have know what was going on!
Sort it out IWC!
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The IW Council Web Site
Over 4 years ago Dave Price was telling Councillors that the resources provided to him were under half those required to support what was, with the Eduwight site, a very adventurous Website specification. Since then there have been insufficient increases in bandwidth, some creaking equipment still remains and there have also been large reductions in staff support (including the ‘disappearance’ of David Price around the time of the ‘senior staff cull’). The other main problem is: who is responsible for updating pages? This often involves a comprehensive telephone conference before a decision is made with consequential delays in posting. Meanwhile, councillors continue to assume, announce and I expect, believe, how well the service works.
During the Great Snow of 2010 the IW Council Web Site tried hard but did not succeed, the IWCP largely failed as, as usual, it largely regurgitated what it found on the Council’s site and on the Ventnor Blog so well done VB your coverage was honest and by far the best available. However, next time there is an emergency, the Council’s site must do better or the elected members must lower their expectations of it.
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It’s easy to post unsubstantiated comments on here
Isn’t it VB blaggers
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Care to detail?
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to quote Nick Edwards:
‘Definitely, the place to go for accurate and useful information was Ventnorblog. Thanks for providing such a great service! ‘
I’m trying to find out what day the bins are going to be emptied in my road, Church Lane Ryde, but can’t find anywhere on this site that will tell me!!!.
on another note, I’ve also just tried using the link at the top of the page to the latest roads information. Within that page there is a bit which say ‘jump to’ and then a link to closed roads, when you click on the link you get ‘Error 404 – Hey, sorry, we couldn’t find what you asked for’
So much for accurate and useful information.
Oh dear
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Hi Dave
To find out about rubbish collections a quick search is all you need. This page which is the first result returned will tell you that all rubbish collections are due to be made on their normal days this week.
Thanks also for letting us know about the single missing link (now fixed), not bad during a week’s worth of frantic coverage eh! That aside, simply scrolling down the page would have landed you at the desired information.
Bit quiet at County Hall today?
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That’s true now (and since Wednesday), but wasn’t for the first week of the snow… it either showed no change from the standard Christmas collection page(s) or “service unavailable”. VB was reporting the current info each day.
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I commented earlier that this blog does not contain a link to the site it was slating
But my post was removed, why?. It seemed like a fair comment to me
It appears that this site is censoring the comments to show weight for its own arguments, that is unfair, don’t you agree
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If the comments were being censored to bolster their own argument, surely your one I’m replying to would have been removed? Perhaps you prefer the CP website where you can’t even comment?
And the council website is hardly a secret, the article says “iwight” website and that is all you need to type into your browser to find it. Not that it’s going to help, it’s been down for the last 10 minutes with “Service Unavailable”!!!
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Ha ha – complete classic. Thanks for the heads up on that eBod.
Here’s what I just screen grabbed.
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It said “Service Unavailable” only earlier – maybe someone has been reading VB and stuck up a better error message!
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You can comment on the CP website. I email the contact if something is ‘wrong’.
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Hi John
Your comment was not removed, it was simply sitting in a moderation queue that we hadn’t got around to dealing with. As you’ll see it’s now approved (no.3).
Kind of bizarre comment above about the link, everyone who uses the Internet on the Island knows the url, but we’ll add a link if that makes you happy.
Oops, just gone 4pm, time to go home?
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I have also noticed a few posts not showing up when I post on VB, Some get filtered for moderation and some dont show atall. :(
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Bit confused about this Clarkee, I have just been through the comments pending folder and cannot find any comments from you awaiting approval.
Perhaps as happened before (when you thought we’d deleted a comment) you’re looking in the wrong place?
If you want to give more specific details by email I’ll try to get to the bottom of it.
Rest assured, we certainly do not delete comments.
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I once posted a comment in relation to Ventnor Skate Park which defended the council and that never got published, so I do have to say that sometimes it looks like comments are picked and chosen to suit VB and it’s readers. I wonder if this one will get through?
For what it’s worth, I went onto Iwight.com several times last week and it was fine. I think only once I could not get on, yet I logged onto it again straight after and it loaded – so to say in your article that the website was not available is misleading to say the least.
I am sure if VB got the same amount of visitors as Iwight last week, then VB would’ve suffered problems as well with slow service.
If you ask me, it coming across that VB don’t like the fact that iwight.com got 10s of thousands more visitors than VB did and VB doesnt like it.
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iwight.com of limited use I found, as was county press. The isle of wight radio site was useless. It was vb for me. Well done guys, good info quickly updated.
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But surely all of the schools/highways information that was displayed on Ventnor Blog during the adverse weather last week originated from the iwight website anyway? I also looked on Isle of Wight Radio’s website and they were displaying a straight copy of the press release from iwight! It seems all too easy for media organisations to reproduce content and then claim all the glory for publishing it, anyone could do that after all. Some credit should be given to the people at county hall for collating it in the first place.
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Yes Emma you’re right, all the info we published came from the press office, which you’ll see in the article we highly praised (and even named the individuals).
We also chose to adapt the format of the information (which some of our readers thanked us for) by separating it into different pages for travel / schools / roads and public/health services to make it easier for readers to find what they needed as quickly as possible.
No-one is disputing that a lot of work goes into the iWight website (and as you’ll see from another of my comments below, we have highly praised it in the past), we’re simply commenting that many people (including us) had lots of problems logging on, so we found the press release praising it quite surprising.
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Hi Sal – your response is a little bemusing and I think you need to read your article back again.
Firstly, you say you ‘praise’ the press office etc, but your article clearly implies that the press office was having problems coping by saying the press office was ‘frantically updating’ the information on the site – doesnt read like praise to me. If the website was down all the time and you couldnt ever get on it, how did you know it was ‘frantically updated’ all the time? Also, what do you mean by ‘frantically’ exactly? IW Radio were giving out information every two minutes, is that ‘frantic’ as well.
Also, I (I suspect unlike most of your readcers) actually went onto iwight and read the press release about the website. At no point does it say the council is praising the performance of iwight.com which is what your article, and headline, implies. All it focuses on is the number of visitors and also page views and states it attracted a huge number of visitors. It also has a quote thanking the local media, which you seemed to have somehow missed out in your article.
Your article is quite misleading and its angle is not true of what the council actually said in its press release, which I think is entirely fair and if I was workign for the council’s IT department, I too would want to shout about the website.
Why don’t you just admit that you don’t like competing against iwight.com and the other media when it comes to reporting important island information, because that’s certainly how it’s coming across.
Rant over…
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Vetnorblog won hands down every time! My daughter (aged 14) and her mates used VB to catch up on all the school closures and bus/rail time tables – it became their first point of contact. Well done guys for being the No.1 news provider on the Island. Brenda.
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I agree Shobba….. VB was by far the best source of info and we followed you on Twitter throughout the schools closure period. Info on Iwight was at best, painfully slow to load and more often than not, unavailable.
Thank you both so much, you provide a great service to the island.
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Thank God for the Internet! Society was obviously crumbling before blogs came along!
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I think all praise needs to be given to Donna Taylor who created the facebook help page. Everyone I know was using this to find out information and actually did not bother with the councils site and sorry vb but bypassed you also.
Well done Donna!!!
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Sorry VB but I have to agree wholeheartedly with Jonnybbad on this occasion – it’s all sounding a bit like sour grapes to me!
@ Sal – OK so some people might have experienced problems logging on to the council’s website as Islanders scrambled to find out whether schools and roads were open during the bad weather, that’s fair enough. However can you honestly say that if faced with the sudden surge in traffic VB wouldn’t have been affected in exactly the same way?
Websites being bombarded with demand for concert ticket sales, the latest hot deal or a breaking news story tend to experience a decline in performance and very often crash owing to the extreme pressure being put on their servers by the overwhelming number of visitors- we’re not witnessing anything new here guys! I heard IW Radio’s site went down for hours. @ Andrew – this was absolutely not the case with iwight as I was a frequent visitor and can categorically state that it was not “down for days” as you incorrectly imply above.
That said, I’ve no doubt the tech bods at County Hall are looking into ways to try and alleviate these issues in the future; the extremity of the weather conditions did take everyone by surprise let’s be fair. So maybe the subsequent press release may have got a handful of individual’s backs-up but I don’t think you can really blame them for wanting to shout about having received that many hits to their website. Wouldn’t you do exactly the same should you ever have more than 175,000 visitors logging onto VB and almost 2.3m page views in the space of a few days???!!!!
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Same thing did happened to Ventnorblog not that long ago, I couldn’t access this site when mainstream media covered a VB Story
This was the one….
http://ventnorblog.com/2010/01/13/are-robert-pattinson-and-kristen-stewart-robsten-buying-a-place-on-the-isle-of-wight/
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Yes, that’s right, there were a couple of hours where the VB server became pretty much inaccessible.
It’s hardly a secret, as those following us on Twitter will have seen us tweet about it “Wow! The link 2us in People magazine’s article http://bit.ly/7beuka on Robert Pattinson & Kristen Stewart Ventnor trip is killing our server.”
People Magazine had provided a link to VentnorBlog when it was covering the RobSten story, directing thousands of people worldwide, to hit our servers at the same time.
Obviously we weren’t happy about the site becoming inaccessible, so we sought a technical solution for the problem.
After some research and asking the advice of people who know far more about the technical machination of Webservers than us, we implemented a caching system that enable us to serve all of the pages that were being requested globally. The server changed from delivering no pages, to its usual performance level.
This caching is still in place and in fact helped us to be able to server all of the Web pages that were requested when the iWight servers suffered the most.
Summary: Technical issues can be resolved if you’ve got the inclination and determination.
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I’m sorry Simon/Sal – don’t you think it’s a little pot calling kettle black that there’s you and the usual posters having a go about iwight.com being slow/unavailable, when you’ve just admitted yourselves that when VB experienced a high level of visitors, your site crashed?
You’ve looked for solutions to prevent it happening again, which is no doubt what the council will do – so why are you having a go at the council?
Like I said previously, it’s coming strongly across that VB does not like it that iwight.com had huge numbers of visitors and VB did not get anywhere near as many – and that its a case of sour grapes here.
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Err … you somewhat missed the point of my comment – We did something about it – not continue to have our readers suffer under not being able to view the site.
iWight clearly didn’t fix it, as the site was complete unavailable at certain points spread over a number of the days of the snow.
Oh and where does this idea of it being sour grapes come from? Because of the failure of iWight to deliver Web pages at a few vital points, VB gained more traffic and more readers, how could that ever be seen as sour grapes?
In the interest of transparency, don’t you think it would be right to declare if you work for the IW Council, or specifically the tech team? (Why else would you go to such trouble defending something that clearly failed?)
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Err … you somewhat missed the point of my comment – We did something about it – not continue to have our readers suffer under not being able to view the site.
iWight clearly didn’t fix it, as the site was complete unavailable at certain points spread over a number of the days of the snow.
Oh and where does this idea of it being sour grapes come from. Because of the failure of iWight to deliver Web pages at a few vital points, VB gained more traffic and more readers, how could that ever be seen as sour grapes?
In the interest of transparency, don’t you think it would be right to declare if you work for the IW Council, or specifically the tech team? (Why else would you go to such trouble defending something that clearly failed?)
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Simon, I didn’t state in my comment it was a secret. I just mentioned the same also happened to your site.
I also read it on twitter hence knowing about it.
For the record the same happens with facebook and twitter all the time. Please dont get on the defensive because I pointed it out :/
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Sigh.
Even the local government can’t get it right. They should have predicted the outage, and looked into cloud computing (Amazon EC2) for the busy period. This would have enabled them to scale efficiently and cheaply (Would have cost less than £50, and that’s even a high estimate). iWight.com needs a serious upgrade, they do not need to be using hard-to-scale ASP, on Windows technology, then need to be using Ruby on Rails or a similar framework for their site with a nice web 2.0 layout (the current layout looks pree 2005, so ugly).
It’s pretty disgusting how they can hardly manage.
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IOW Council Computer system had a 50K updat this year and paid a mainland consultancy/training company to come to the Ilsand to train users.
After 3 days of not getting on the councils website, I gave up…all the info I needed was here and available.
Amazing what 2 people can achieve when an entire council can’t
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Who was the 50k paid to? and was that company limked to the coumcil? Only reasom 4 askeing is because I have a two dedicated servers hosting over 400 accounts on each and most are heavy users.
MY SERVER SPECS:
Intel Dual QuadCore Xeon
12 GB RAM
500 GB MAIN SATA HDD
500 GB MAIN SATA HDD (backup)
2000 GB Monthly Transfer
4 IP Addresses
FULLY MANAGED
FREE PHONE OR LIVE SUPPORT
£320 per month or £3840 per year
50k would guve me a poewrhouse for just one site, paid up and fully for around 13 years.
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You know, if you were buying that for a year or longer, it’d be a lot cheaper to co-locate.
Renting hardware for long periods of time is a big no-no.
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well they did get a whole new forum…that hardly anybody uses anymore
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Chris, Just making an example of how far 50k could go :)
I pay monthly for my boxes, I’m not quite rich enough to pay upfront for the year, let alone co-locate just yet.
But that would be an even cheaper option for a big company like iwcouncil. As for the forum lol. Jelsoft Vbulletin – around 100 pounds for a licence :)
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Most of that 50k was probably for staff training and their (unnecessary) websites (Server-side and design). I think they’re hosting on older servers, if Ryde High School’s infrastructure is anything to go by – Dell servers from years ago.
Also, they wouldn’t be able to use vBulletin, as their server-side technology is ASP. I know they could easily migrate to Linux and either migrate the site to PHP (Better option), or stick with mod_mono, and PHP on the box (For vB), or infact have 2 separate boxes. Also there are more free open source options that have just as many features, or more, with source code released in the public domain (under a licence).
If I’d be in charge of the IT department, I’d colo 2 servers, one with Lighttpd and one with MySQL. Web server with an older quad core, and maybe maximum of a 500gb hard drive, and the Database server with a few terabyte drives (RAID of course), backed up remotely.
THe site wouldn’t be that hard, all I guess it does is pull content from a database. If the content is stored in static HTML files, shame on you Isle of Wight council.
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I made an offical comment to the council about their website, praising them for the content, but having a go at them over the delivery service. You could not load up pages when you most needed them i.e. Early Sunday night – Is my child’s school open or closed tomorrow morning? VB were brillant and never crashed! to my knowledge.
Anyway I got a reply to my comments from the IWC IT department admitting that the service was poor and they are investigating how to deal with ‘spikes’ in the future.
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Looking through these comments, what I don’t understand Simon is why, as soon as anyone tries to express a balanced view on VB they are immediately assumed to be an employee of the council? Jonnybbad is not the only person who has attempted to discuss the subject with a little bit of open-mindedness (something which seems to be severely lacking on this site). I don’t work for the council and I don’t have any particular bias towards either of the two sites (iwight or VB). I do however feel that it’s ludacris for VB to try and assume supremity in terms of Island ‘status’ in the web world, as the local authority will always win hands down in terms of visitor numbers and site traffic. VB is a completely different ball-game with a completely different ethos so why the need for all this competition and yes, to quote the above, sour grapes?
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It’s a bit rich complaining about VB! IW COUNCIL ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR EMERGENCY PLANNING! If this is the best they can do in snow, God help us if we ever faced a proper serious emergency.
Sorry, but iwight.com wasn’t great, it should’ve been better and they should of fixed the problem sooner. As ever, the will does not exist at County Hall. A ‘we do our best’ attitude is everywhere up there, even when it aint good enough. Out of hours they are diabolical. Staff answering the telephone were at times aggressive and from Tuesday, gave out the wrong info re gritters etc.
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IOW council spend 100′s of thousands of pounds on its computer system to provide information it is required to provide.
VB is a private blog written by 2 people.
IOW Council can’t run a p#ss up in a brewry with our wasting another million pound on consultants or pointlessly persuing ex-councillors…the onlt real shame is that their only major opposition is as inacabaple as they are of even doing the basic job, without having to cope with 2 days snow, when the rest of the country has REAl problems
They are a joke which would be really funny if not true
Its not sour grapes…its shame at the ludicrousness of the whole situation
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