Yes, I know tweet deck etc. take care of all that for you, but I like using the web interface. Sometimes I think twitter relies too much on people using 3rd party apps to interact with it’s service.

This handy snippet of code will make sure your site doesn’t look so obviously stale.
<script type=”text/javascript”>
<!–
var currentTime = new Date()

var year = currentTime.getFullYear()
document.write(year)
//–>
</script>

Simpy insert it in the HTML where you would have had the year, and it will always pull the current year.

Web Devloper toolbar

Essential for anyone who works on websites. My favourite features are

• View Style Information
  Very handy for editing CSS templates. You can pick the element you want to alter, and the extension will show you it’s properties and where to find it in the CSS files.
• View Form Information
  Shows the details of a form, hidden fields, submit url etc.
• Clear Domain Cookies
  Very handy for testing sites that ask you to log in. You can easily kill all related cookies and appear like an anonymous user.

ColorZilla

See a colour on a website you like, colorzilla gives you a handy picker that will give you the Hex code for it.

MeasureIt

A useful tool for measuring the size of elements on a page

ScreenGrab!

Take screenshots of web pages, with options for the entire page, visible portion, or a selection.

Dust-Me Selectors

Parses a sites CSS to identify unused styles. Allowing you to cut down bloated stylesheets.

Fire FTP

Does what it says on the tin. An in-browser FTP client for Firefox.

This is pretty amazing, but are we really wowed by technology any more?

I think the really cool thing about this, is the power of social media to promote the service, and the company.

Kevin is followed by more than 200,000 people on twitter, and once he tweeted about this, he instantly got thousands of viewers to his stream. Instant advertising for Virgin America, and what’s more, they didn’t even have to do anything for it.

I have a feeling this will snowball, and hit the mainstream media pretty soon.

Allow for Power-users

In the sales pitch for almost every CMS I’ve ever seen they talk about how it’s so easy to use the company MD/CEO can update the website. Be careful of this claim, how many companies have you seen where the MD has the time or inclination to update the website? All but the smallest one and two man operations will delegate this task out to someone else in the company. In medium to large companies the job can be given to a dedicated person.

Content Management Systems that are too focussed on ease of use often make these fatal mistakes:

• Easy to use, but long winded.
  Ease of use is not necessarily efficiency of use. Experienced users will look for shortcuts and quick ways to perform tasks. Make sure such features exist if people are going to have to live with the CMS every day.
• Lack of flexibility
  Some systems are so locked down that the users ability to achieve anything but the most basic tasks is completely hobbled. Allow people who know their stuff to use their judgement in managing content, don’t just lock them into a rigid set of rules. Or every meeting where a suggestion of posting something to the website is met with a sharp intake of breath and a shake of the head.

Don’t get locked into a propietary system

Building a website based on a CMS usually means that your company has grown to such a level that it feels the website needs to be managed in a more efficient way, and you have taken the decision to invest considerable money into your online presence.

That usually means contracting a web design firm to build it for you, and all the pitfalls that entails. With the best will in the world relationships between clients and contractors often fail. From simple personality conflicts all the way down to downright incompetence the relationship can deteriorate to such a condition that neither party wants to work together any more.

With that in mind, the last thing you want is to be in a situation where you have no choice but to work with the people you fell out with.  So I would always recommend choosing a system that is supported by a large number of potential contractors. Such a system would most likely be open source, but if you’re not a fan of the OSS model, there are plenty of proprietary systems out there with multiple licenced developers.

It’s hardly surprising they pulled a move like that, they would hardly have gotten any attendance otherwise. They are after all politicians, what else would people expect?

All that aside, I checked out the new site and here are some thoughts.

SEO

The designers seem to have missed a cruicial factor in redesigning any website. They squandered any search engine ranking that the site may have had by not redirecting the old addresses to the new ones. Clearly they based the new site on a new content management system which means a complete change in the structure of the sites addresses. The widely published solution to this problem is to use 301 redirects. You simply inventory all your pages and redirect the old URL to the new equivalent.

So for example, if you google the TD Martin Mansergh, the first result is the FF website, but when you follow the link you get a 404 Page not Found.

Which leads me to my next gripe

No Search function?

Really, in this day and age? The absence of a search function is just downright laziness. Google offer an excellent free search service that you can embed in your own site and for a small fee you can remove the advertising.

So at this point, I’ve found my way to the site via a URL that no longer exists and I have no way to continue to find what I’m looking for. Poor show.

Edit your copy

Assuming you have persevered long enough to find what you’re looking for you will no doubt be frustrated by the unreadable content. Check out the screenshot below that shows a typical page of content.

There are no paragraphs, no sub-heads, and barely any punctuation. 5 minutes is all it would have taken to make this content readable but it seems it wasn’t worth the effort.

Image Maps?

I don’t think I’ve seen an HTML image map used since about 2001 but their web designers have resurrected it for reasons unknown. The clickable map works, but only just. Flash would have offered a far better user experience, and the issue of support for flash is long gone.

Overall this site looks pretty good, and FF are to be commended for their adoption of social networking tools like twitter, and facebook. But when you scratch below the surface it’s a pretty poor show.