Lies and news from the club and Martin O'Neill speaks
Wednesday, 21 November 07, 10:12 AM · Comments (12)
Just doing a quick round up of the news for you and while you're reading this I'd very much appreciate it if you could force a reload of your browser by pressing shift and F5 or reload at the same time - it might tidy the site up a little bit for you.
But onto the news, or actually the lies first and this has to get a mention as there are more and more complaints surfacing and because, whichever way you look at it, it was a lie.
First off you need to know this; the club told us we were getting a new club website with more fan appeal and not just a new design.
I've left it for a few days and I've even tried to write something about it but it's always turned into a rant and call to arms ending with the classic - this can't happen to us again, but then I remember I've already said this twice to the new board in eighteen months.
I'm starting to see a trend here and I've got to mention it.
Basically the new website is awful - there are more error pages, more bad images and functionally it is worse. The irony is, by not using this opportunity to move forward they've actually gone backwards.
They've just let five years of web development, system integration, software development and web standards pass them by.
I count four new websites from the club recently and while I've got no idea how much they spent, although from what I can see I know its not much and rumour has it they didn't want to spend the money, it could have been done better for less than what we're paying Thomas Sorensen and Shaun Maloney a week and they're not even playing football.
I had to get this out because it's awful and I know I'm going to need to refer to this and if you don't agree or don't understand why it is important, then that's also fine - but for a few it is important and actually even if it was only important to me, I'm still going to write about it.
Anyway, I'm glad I've got that out of the system because the club have just wasted all of £300 on those four new websites and now they're going to have to spend £50,000 on doing it properly because it's actually quite embarrassing.
If they don't do it properly then that's probably sending out a bigger message and one I can now read seeing as I've lost my tinted glasses.
Onto the news - the club have released a third kit. Mark my words, it will be used in at least one match, because they've produced it and they're going to have to but it is quite literally just a way for the club to take more money out of you right before Christmas which is good business by the club and will make them money.
That's almost it. Two things from the manager first - he's happy with the loan deal we have with Scott Carson and hasn't heard from Liverpool and isn't aware of comments made by red Rafa last week and he's got a job to do at Villa and isn't going off to manage England.
Personally I'd love Scott Carson to stay but I suspect the valuation is probably putting the club off and I'm also glad that Martin O'Neill isn't off to manage England as I'm convinced he can get us back into Europe each season.
It is absolute nonsense. I do not even remember saying it, to be perfectly honest. I said something some time ago to the tune that England would qualify and was asked something on the back of that that was completely and utterly hypothetical. It is utterly pointless to talk about it. I am committed to Aston Villa. I cannot end speculation. I have had it for years and years and years, no matter what you say. I have a big commitment to Aston Villa. It is as simple as that.
Martin O'Neill, November 21st 2007
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12 Comments · Add yours
It depends upon where you start from. If you've bookmarked any of the old pages you may get errors because they seem to have vestiges of these old pages lying around but if you start from the base url of the website you shouldn't have any problems. The key is that if you get a page with a claret background you will almost certainly get a problem. Here's an example .. I always had the Ticket page as part of my homepage so that I could see ticket offers. That URL was OLD page with a Claret background:
LINK
the NEW page with a White Background is:
LINK
They should have deleted all of the OLD pages and just given you a 404 but because they are still serving them (or because they are cached somewhere) you see this problem.
damian i agree with everything you said. would love carson to stay and im delighted mon will be staying. that new site is awful indeed, more like a new web shite. theres is nothing in it and i have stopped using it and only use tis site for villa news. i no nothing about web design but wud have managed better than that. going cheap on the site next it will be cheap on players
hi PaulVillan
thats not actually true. just from the base url you can get to error pages. go to the homepage now and then scroll to the bottom and click on the Privacy or Careers link ...
thats just 2 that i've found for you now. there are loads of others and i'm not keeping count. my point is this kept getting put back and back for what reason? these things should have been picked up and they lied to us.
the four websites are the club one, seat exchange, the club shop and the ticketing site ... they should have all come under one site instead of this shoddy barrow boy approach
Damian, why don't you start from another angle, then it might not turn into a rant. What exactly do you want on the website? Once you've made that list divide it up into three categories: things that the site doesn't provide at all, things that it does provide but aren't good enough, and things that are fine. It might be a more coherent critique.
This isn't a dig - I'm genuinely interested to know because I've found the new website to be perfectly fine. There were a couple of times on the first day I got an error message but since then I haven't had a problem. The reserve league table isn't up but I'm sure they'll get to it soon enough. While I accept that the design is similar to previously it's generally brighter and easier on the eye. I think there is less clutter too and the squad profiles are a nice touch. About the only consistent problem I've had is with some of the internal scroll bars which don't appear in the avtv section - but on investigation this is something to do with the browser I use.
One thought on changing the design completely (though probably only applicable to a very small minority of Villa's web audience): silver surfers tend to get lost! My Dad is a classic for this. If the format of a website is changed too dramatically he gives up until I've shown him how to navigate it again.
spud
its not actually a case of what i'd like to see. its turned into a rant because 'we' got lied to and i'm taking it personally
even though the design is shocking - look at the aston villa badge used in the 'last match' box and look at the boro badge in the next match - the villa badge has different thickness border and looks like its squeezed in and the boro badge has a white background because it was 'easier' and it's a JPEG - a standard used in web development 5 years ago
these are just two of (what i can quickly count) 8 basic design errors on the homepage alone - if you gave me 10 minutes i'd find more advanced ones i'm sure
the content is awful. jack woodward is awful. the forum is awful (uses 3 scroll bars on a single page) and when did purple become part of the club colours?
i dont mind the website spud. i dont like lies ... if they're going to lie to us about this what else are they going to lie to us about?
they missed an opportunity and lied to us .. is it amateur hour?
I just posted on the forum about a complaint with the website. On the old site you could down load the movie clips and play them off line. This improved quality. With the new site you cannot do this - you have to stream them and this leads to them being virtually un-viewable because of the interruptions. I have emailed AVTV twice to find out why I cannot download the clips but have been ignored both times. Also, before there was an option just to get the commentary feeds - this also seems to have disappeared - you can only subscribe to the full package now – which is of course about 15 times more expensive.
I agree, Damian.
The 'new' website is not, in fact, a new website at all. It's a new stylesheet with a few new features bolted on to the same back end and some of the pages moved around. Any amateur website designer could do better, given enough time, and would probably take more pride in getting it right.
It's quite embarrassing really.
Im so glad martin has said that.. Now the F.A can go and look elsewhere mclaren is a joke he hasnt the slightest idea as to what he is doin that formation for the first half was an absolute piss take get him out i cant stand the bloke
Mclaren= nation wrecker
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i'm not being funny but you go on like your website is top class it is nothing compared to the actual villa website, fair enough its only a blog page but still don't knock someone elses efforts to try to make a better website
Mourinho for england, mons the man to get us into europe with the spending power he will have in jan and mclaren well...... no comment!
Lol Im a Middlesbroguh fc fan i typed in google boro badge backgrounds and it came with this shite Lol MFC FOR LIFE ;D :)