Bedfordshire Association

No developments to the temporary site yet, apart from a notice giving a link to a form to gift aid subscriptions. Excellent -all Associations should do this EVEN IF IT MEANS A LITTLE WORK AND A SLIGHT RULE CHANGE!!

Ok, since I wrot the review published below, the site has  changed and is now advertised as a temporary website which is undergoing reconstruction. It now has just basic information (at least this includes mames of the District Officers). There are no details for individual tower, only practice night information is given. For tower contacts one contacts the (new?) webmaster who is at least named and has a proper, not generic email. So watch this space. I will be watching the new Bedforshire website and will report any changes, but will leave the analysis below as a warning of how bad it was before.

Oh. Dear.
First impressions are not good. The 2nd item on the Home Page advertises a Young Ringers Event for November 2010. The menu bar down the left also only has 'Diary 2010'  (as at Jan 14th 2011) though when you click this is does give an option to 'go to 2011' (and 2009 and 2008!) but this could easilly be missed. Moving down the menu tabs on the left, the News and Events stops at 2009. There are no obvious direct links to the Officers or indeed much Association information at all(some basic information can be found under the Information tab but the Oficers can only be found under Contact Us way down the menu bar and only the Assocaition officers (a mere 5 of them) are named; no phone numbers are given and the emails are generic. The District contacts are not even named. The towers are listed by practice night but they are not linked to the full tower details. The district pages are abysmal. There is a basic map (but has no roads or names) with numbered dots so if you don't know which tower is which you randomly click until you find the one you want, which when clicked merely takes you further down the page to a table giving very brief details of each tower -bells, weight, service times, practice night and a tower contact name only. Only For details you have to contact the un-named District Sectrary through a generic email (last time I tried I did not get a reply) . Information to an event in the past is still on one branch page. It is quite easy to navigate around but only because there is so little content you can't possibly get lost. I'm not surprised the Webmaster is not named on the site. It could (and should) be much much better. It's hopeless, actually.
Overall grade D-
http://www.bacr.co.uk/