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Rory Cellan-Jones

A Royal web event

  • Rory Cellan-Jones
  • 12 Feb 09, 17:45 GMT

roryqueen.jpgFor Britain's technology crowd, Buckingham Palace is rather far from their usual beat. But inside the Palace at lunchtime, you would have found senior people from Google, Apple and AOL, assorted professors of computing, web entrepreneurs (from Brent Hoberman, founder of lastminute.com, to Michael Smith of Firebox), and just about anyone else who you'd normally find at a techie networking event. Oh, and a motley crew of technology journalists, including yours truly.

We were here to meet royalty - not just the Queen, but Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the world wide web and probably the only person for whom the technology world has unalloyed respect. Sir Tim was on hand to unveil the relaunched royal website, .

The website was born back in 1997, which now seems relatively early in the history of the web. It has now undergone major renovations, with far more video and more opportunities for interaction, including a Google map which allows you to track royal visits to your area.

At this stage you cannot email the Queen and there is no evidence that Her Majesty wishes to blog or join a social network. I do gather, however, that at least one member of the royal family is considering starting a blog.

Sir Tim gave us a brief history of the web and the royal site - and then handed over a remote control device to the Queen. After Her Majesty pressed a button there was a brief hiatus - and suddenly we were seeing the "surprise" element of the website, what the Palace is calling "virtual rooms". High-resolution pictures shot inside Windsor Castle and Buckingham Palace will now allow visitors to get a look around.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee hadn't actually knocked up a new website for the Queen. That was the responsibility of Emma Goodey from the Royal Household. I asked her whether she had some ornate title - Her Majesty's Webmaster? - but I'm afraid she doesn't. She told me that there had been months of effort, much of it involving working out just what it was that drew members of the public to the website and kept them there. "We didn't want to make assumptions about what people wanted - we wanted to go out there and find out".

So far, it seems to have done the job, with heavy traffic to the new site. When I looked mid-afternoon, the "virtual rooms" were not yet visible - the Palace told me that it was waiting for a bit of a lull before putting the bandwidth-hungry material up.

I grabbed a quick chat with Sir Tim to get his views on good website practice - for royal families, governments and other public bodies.

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The technology crowd at the launch seemed impressed by the new site, but they were not going to miss the opportunity to do some heavy networking, swapping rumours about other businesses and boosting their own. One executive from a social networking site told me they were about to have a "fabulous" relaunch, another told me that his interior design website was worthy of an hour long television programme.

And I think I may have achieved my own technology breakthrough - from inside the Palace. And I sent a of Sir Tim Berners-Lee to Twitter just before the event got underway. Members of the Buckingham Palace press office told me they were pretty sure that this had never happened before. But I think we can be pretty confident that, whatever the technological progress made by the royal website, we won't be seeing tweets from the Queen.

Comments

  • Comment number 1.

    Rory

    Did yourself or any of the many web luminaries mention to each other how disappointing the new site is?

    Text heavy homepage, popups to view the YouTube videos?? Poor SEO optimisation?? 4 clicks to view the virtual rooms if you know where to begin, which then opens in a new window.

    Oh dear - I actually prefer the previous site.

    Bruce.


  • Comment number 2.

    I'm not sure Sir Tim Berners-Lee would be impressed by the new website's compliance with standards. I am a small-time web developer and I would be sacked if one of my sites' home pages showed 10 errors on the World Wide Web Consortium HTML validator - try it at

  • Comment number 3.

    Do you get paid to advertise Twitter?

  • Comment number 4.

    Some good points made about the quality of the new site - it does look very text heavy, the videos aren't exactly easy to launch, and there seems to be a certain tardiness in putting new material up.

    It does seem bizarre, for instance, that two days after the new site was launched, there is no video of Sir Tim Berners-Lee and the Queen pressing the button.

    But I do wonder whether there is a gulf opening up between the web design community, their clients and the average web user? Who decides what a "good" website is - does the public care for instance about those 10 HTML errors pointed out by the WWW Consortium validator?

    It reminds me of the tensions between "creatives" at ad agencies, who design beautiful enigmatic ads, and their clients who only want to know where the pack shot is - oh, and the viewers who scratch their heads and wonder what is being promoted.

    This particular redesign may not impress web designers - but I imagine the Palace will look at the traffic figures to judge whether or not it is a success.

  • Comment number 5.

    We do care about errors in the HTML if it means the page doesn't render properly in our browsers. But we shouldn't have to care about it as it's an inherent expectation that any given website will just work properly, that's the job of the web programmer.

    Sorry Rory, that's one of the sillier statements I've heard from you. It's like saying no-one cares if Virgin maintain their airplanes to the relevent standards so long as the hostesses have short enough skirts?

  • Comment number 6.

    A lot of research from 'average users' went into the new design, I'm speaking as somebody who attended the palace about 2 weeks prior to the official launch to view the site, use it and give my thoughts and opinions.

    I personally think the site is similar to that of quite a few government departments, though whether the same outside agencies were involved in building the Royal site is another question..

  • Comment number 7.

    I forgot to mention also that the reasoning behind the pop ups is that they don't want people leaving the site as soon as they click a video, so by viewing YouTube videos within a popup means that you're still connected to the website.

    That's also a reason behind the "last 5 pages I visited" links on the left menu of the majority of pages.

  • Comment number 8.

    So one has a new website does one?

    I'm all for anyone having a website and "revamping" it once in a while but how much did this "revamp" cost people like me - The taxpayers!?

 

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