Sonet Journal

About a year ago we were working on a Government contract to deliver an accessible website and maintain the site with the view to building a larger and more up-to-date content management system (CMS) for the website in the near future. Six months into the contract and I was having a lunch with the burser who informed me he felt that the government would possibly be looking to close the site down and a few others in the future, he was not really sure if this would happen but indications told him it may be expected.

Reading the BBC news this morning and came across this article Government to close 551 websites caught my attention and there it was, the prediction appeared to be ringing true. Yes, the UK Govt does intend to close a lot of it’s websites and steamline through two central websites. The belief is that visitors prefer to find information quickly rather than surfing through various sites and links to find it.

While broadly speaking we are in agreement with this, and yes it is a good news as it shows that the Govt. are definitely evolving and listening to feedback online, it does leave the question open to doing business with the government. Who now is favoured to get the contracts to maintain and build these Govt. supersites? Before now departments and agencies were free to choose who they wanted building their sites as long as the web development company met the criterion to tender. This had it’s benefits, as smaller or medium sized companies were considered for choice government work. Now it would appear that the contracts may go to much larger corporate firms to build these projects. When this happens they usually tend to farm the work out at a ridicously low price to the small to mid-sized firms.

Identity & Individuality Questions

Another issue may arise about the loss of data and individuality. A lot of smaller government websites are clearly a labour of love and reflect years of effort to get the right design and information up for it’s visitors. Will this now be lost? By moving to supersites will we see a watered down version of information from these independent government websites, will the identity of these sites be affected?

I’ll draw a parallel here with what Best Western did to some of the sites under their control. So eager were they to implement their branding on other hotels that any hotel under their jurisdiction had to change their site to a Best Western styled site. A good example is the Red Lion in Salisbury a beautiful hotel with a long history, their site had to come down and be replaced with the Best Western brand. I believe the term is called steam-rolling.

Hoepfully whoever takes charge of the transition of these sites to the new supersites comes up with an architecture that allows for a certain amount of autonomy in the upkeep of these sites.

As work seems to be dominating all aspects of my life at the moment it has not given me much chance to come here and add notes and talk about Internet life in general. I was prompted today to get my butt over here and kick off 2007 with a few words and mention what we are doing at the moment.

Lot’s of surprises for 2007. Southbourne Internet as a company will meld into Sonet Web and concentrate heavily several key-areas:

E-Commerce Development

Online Advertising

Search Engine Marketing

Content Management & Integrated Publishing Platforms

Mobile Web (advertising and development).

With this Sonet Web will be working with a couple of different companies to provide effective browser based solutions. Exciting times are ahead for us. We felt it was time to take the steps to expansion. In the next few months we will be working to a plan for this.

Search and Go Portal
As for Search and Go we will be upping the ante and releasing the news service in the next few days. Following this will be the news commenting system which is down to time and capital…! Not always easy as anyone who has built large portal will tell you. We are keen to now put up the long awaited home page. It has been too long and now that traffic is up over 200,000 unique visitors with well over a million page impressions a month we felt it was time to act. There are of ideas planned for the future of Search and Go and the updating of the weather and directory will be very soon. Of course financial considerations need to be weighed and we lack some major budget at present, all in a days work I guess.
Powerset Search Engine
Talking about budget, just finished reading an article in the New York Times titles: In Silicon Valley, the Race Is On to Trump Google. A new search engine with a healthy budget is being created. Powerset want to take on Google at their own game and feel they stand a more than better chance at doing this. Exciting news if they pull this off. I am hoping the year ahead sees more of this kind of entrepreneurship and especially if they are able to deliver good results. You can visit the Powerset blog for updates:
Mobile Web
Seems a little quiet on the mobile web front at present. Calm before the storm or has the mobile internet lost some steam? Having said that we have had more and more enquiries for mobile web design recently, so there is a fair bit of life out there, it just seems a bit slow on the take-up.