SA Firefighter
General Discussion => Country Fire Service => Topic started by: joff on December 02, 2008, 09:46:34 AM
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Hi guys,
Just letting you know about the new Mt Barker CFS website.
www.barkerfire.com (http://www.barkerfire.com)
If anyone has any suggestions or comments about the website let me know on a pm, also if anyone is in a brigade that is interested in a website through firecompanies.com then also send me a pm and I can fill you in on all the details.
Cheers
Joff
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Looks good Joff!............ but aren't you close to touting/advertising for business with your post! :|
The name of the web designer is clearly visible at the bottom of the webpage, that should be enough :-)
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I feel like I've been punched in the face by WordArt. But apart from that, its looking good. How much did the site, minus hosting, set you back?
Glad to see the tradition of the CFS not using SA companies continues!
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not a bad web site very us lookin site,
just on a side since 2003 they appear to have had a new truck every year !!
do they not look after there truck or is there some other reason more political??
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Most of the appliances are hand me downs or are new and there for a few years then moved on for political reasons.
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Edit: [Humour Removed, back on topic]
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just on a side since 2003 they appear to have had a new truck every year !!
do they not look after there truck or is there some other reason more political??
The long and the short of it is that Mt. Barker are a rather busy brigade, with significant risks in their area. They also manage to go about things above brigade level in the right manner, but at the same time don't settle for trucks that are full of issues eg: Dennis.
It a pity they lost their Rescue truck. No way known that you can fit a proper Rescue/Urban stowage on a Type 2 Pumper
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Very nice website, well designed, and i like the overall look of it.
Dunno about the wording of the stories... all a little too american for me.
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We tried to write our stories using typical CFS terms as such but it really did sound strange and very unprofessional in a way, plus a lot of our audience of this site is American so had to come half way with the wording. If you have any other comments please feel free to PM me.
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Dunno about the wording of the stories... all a little too american for me.
Geeze, a big call over only three different terms. Alerted/smoke showing/first report, and even smoke showing is a marginal one. If anything the story writing actually seems professional compared to those in our highly esteemed Volunteer magazine.
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I guess if you get hard over American-style websites from the nineties, then it's a great site.
If you prefer a well designed website that looks professional, is accessible and fits with today's standards, you'd be pretty damn disappointed.
Full credit to Mt Barker for extending their PR to the internet and making an effort with their website though. It's good that some brigades are doing it.
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What makes it the nineties and what other CFS websites are out there that are more up to today's standards as you put it.
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I guess if you get hard over American-style websites from the nineties, then it's a great site.
If you prefer a well designed website that looks professional, is accessible and fits with today's standards, you'd be pretty damn disappointed.
Full credit to Mt Barker for extending their PR to the internet and making an effort with their website though. It's good that some brigades are doing it.
I actually find this post quite insulting CFS Firie. Please supply a list of Brigade websites you have developed so we can similarly critique......with dispariging comments just like yours.
The good thing about this new InterWeb :wink: thing...is there is a bunch of DIFFERENT looking and feeling websites out there for everyone to enjoy, and not just a bunch of MS Publisher template sites, that all look the same (a point apparantly lost on SAFECOM)
Good on you Joff and the Mt Barker guys and girls....at least you had the gumption to put it out there and allow it to be criticised by the uncharitable
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10/10 - misterteddy
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I agree CFSfirey's post is a bit blunt. but i will sat that some of his work on websites is very good and he does know what he is talking about, However i will let him show his own work as some sights may reveal his identity.
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I actually find this post quite insulting CFS Firie. Please supply a list of Brigade websites you have developed so we can similarly critique......with dispariging comments just like yours.
The good thing about this new InterWeb :wink: thing...is there is a bunch of DIFFERENT looking and feeling websites out there for everyone to enjoy, and not just a bunch of MS Publisher template sites, that all look the same (a point apparantly lost on SAFECOM)
Good on you Joff and the Mt Barker guys and girls....at least you had the gumption to put it out there and allow it to be criticised by the uncharitable
A man asks for a critique, gets an honest truthful one and you get your back up over it?
The site is very 90's styled (The terrible WordArt for the title doesn't give that away?), very American and by todays standards, not really worth paying for. Although its obviously a standard templated site from FireCompanies.com, thats not to say its a not a decent site, and far better than most other sites that CFS brigades have built. No flashing gif images is a good starting point ;)
I am a little curious about having the site aimed at an American audience, I would have though it better pitched at the local community that you serve and educate - it smacks a little of delusions of grandeur, but hey, thats just the way I see it :)
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A man asks for a critique, gets an honest truthful one and you get your back up over it?
honest and truthful I'd have no issues with, its the cheap shot in the first sentence I have some problems with Numbers
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honest and truthful I'd have no issues with, its the cheap shot in the first sentence I have some problems with Numbers
You say cheap shot, I say blunt honest opinion. Tomatoes, tomaaatoes - Potatoes Potaaatoes eh?
Consider the whole thing called off. ;)
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It is aimed at the local community with updates on brigade activities and incidents but also community information and fire prevention tips. I was saying it is aimed also at an American audience because Mt Barker have built up some good relationships with other fire departments in the states who like to see what is happening in Australia.
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Looks very good well done to all.....Just one thing can you remove or block out car rego numbers some members of the public who may look at your site and see a car that they know may not like to see it....
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What makes it the nineties and what other CFS websites are out there that are more up to today's standards as you put it.
What makes it 90's? Well, seeing as you asked....
1) Table based layout - the entire website uses tables to set out the content. Doing this was rabid in the 90's because people wanted extend their websites and make them interesting, but browsers didn't support positioning with CSS the to the same extent they do now. Table based websites need more code for them to be written, so they take longer to load. Also many browsers will not display the contents of a table until all the table has been downloaded, so when the entire page is in a table the site will feel much slower to the user.
2) Use of gifs in the menu. All the menu items are images, which then load more images when you mouse over. For a font that looks suspiciously like Impact, the use of images is totally unnecessary! Again, it makes the website load slower, (that's 26 more images you have to download before you can even see the menu), but it also causes the website to become inaccessible to screen readers (for blind people) and search engine robots (that index the site for inclusion in search engine results). The only excuse to use images to replace text this side of the year 2000 is because you absolutely need a font that isn't common. Even then, there are technologies you can use to keep the site accessible.
3) Ridiculously big header banner on every page. That banner is huge! Large banners are generally used on a title page to make a bold statement and catch the users attention. They should not be used on every page. These days, 60% of internet users have a screen resolution of 1024 x 768px and below. The header image is 1000 x 494px, so assuming that a browser window only has 90% of the screen anyway, (because of task-bars, title bars, navigation buttons etc), 60% of people who visit the website will have almost the entire screen filled up with a banner that says "Mount Barker Fire Rescue Serving the hills since 1939". And they'll get that on every page they go to. The remaining 40% will only have half the screen covered, which isn't really that much better.
- On a slightly more technical note, that header should be a CSS background, so that it's only downloaded once, rather than on every page, and there should be an alt text set, so that search engines know the content of the heading. Try searching "barker fire" or "barker cfs" on google.
4) Word art. What? As numbers said, it uses word art, which was all the rage 15 years ago, when the internet was new and exciting. The only place you should expect to see word art these days is on the doctors surgery newsletter, and even then you shouldn't enjoy it.
5) Black background, red text. Yes, they're a fire service and red is associated with fire, but that combo really isn't far off from the flashing animated .gifs that Nirvana were singing along to back in "the good old days". Red on black is a very nasty thing to do to your colour blind audience. Also the use of different colours for links, makes the site less usable. In general, links should be blue, as that's the industry standard that everyone is used to, but if they're changed, they should be the the same colour throughout the site, not a mix of colours.
6) Semantic markup. Headings should be marked as headings (not a link with the class of "toc_headlinebox"). Tables should only be used for tabular data. Lists should be used for lists. Images need alternative text set. Again, not doing this was acceptable last century, but it's fairly poor workmanship these days.
7) The Australian flag. Is this really necessary? Wouldn't a CFS logo be more appropriate, or at least a South Australian flag? That flag is the icing on the Americanisation of the site.
...and that's all just looking at the design and code, not looking at the content. As I said in my first post though, I think it's great that Mount Barker are being pro-active with their website. The fact I dislike the design does not mean I dislike the idea, or the intent behind it.
I don't know of any CFS websites that are up to today's standards - there are several using standard CMS templates with nice simple designs however (see Piccadilly (http://www.cfspiccadilly.com/) or Region 2 Ops (http://www.advancedimaging.com.au/region2ops/portal/index.cfm) for an example).
If you want to see some lovely website designs, have a look at:
- http://www.apple.com/ - Clean, simple and functional
- http://whywewhisper.com/ - Exceptionally simple, but very visually pleasing
- http://enhancedlabs.com/ - Bold colours, with selective use of graphics and balanced as a page
- http://ubuntustudio.org/ - Strong use of colour and graphics make for a very visually appealing website
I actually find this post quite insulting CFS Firie. Please supply a list of Brigade websites you have developed so we can similarly critique......with dispariging comments just like yours.
I don't need to have developed a whole lot of CFS brigade websites to be able to comment on one. Think of all the bollocking of CFS appliances that happens on these forums, and how often to we ask for a list of appliances the users have developed? However, I'm sorry that you find my comment insulting.
The good thing about this new InterWeb :wink: thing...is there is a bunch of DIFFERENT looking and feeling websites out there for everyone to enjoy, and not just a bunch of MS Publisher template sites, that all look the same (a point apparantly lost on SAFECOM)
Couldn't agree more! The last thing we need on the web-o-sphere is to (http://www.communityfire32.com/) have (http://www.cbvfd.net/) lots (http://www.carlisle42.com/) of websites (http://www.botsfordfirerescue.com/) that all (http://www.derbyfire.com/) look (http://www.engine15rescue3.com/) the same (http://www.cvfd7.com/).
Good on you Joff and the Mt Barker guys and girls....at least you had the gumption to put it out there and allow it to be criticised by the uncharitable
So you're saying you're nice comments were just your charity?
Only enemies speak the truth; friends and lovers lie endlessly, caught in the web of duty.
--Stephen King
(Not that I consider myself an enemy - it would just appear I was labelled as one)
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Nice post we need to see more like that.
See the difference a good post can make, CFSFirey's initial post while being quite harsh is perfectly justified by a post like this which does a great job at also saying why. Please everyone on this forum post like this.
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not sure the region 2 ops site is a good example though given it's currently giving "Error Executing Database Query" errors and appears to use coldfusion.
But spot on regarding accessibility, have you run the site though the w3c validator? (validator.w3.org)
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They are all interesting comments 'CFS Firey' it has certainly given me some things to think about for the Morphett Vale CFS website (please don't look at our site or you will have a list of about ten pages of things that are wrong). I would love to do a major update to it at some stage and bring it out the 90's to a more modern standard but at the moment I don't have the time or skills to be able to design a decent site.
The good thing is though that more brigades are starting to get a web presence, for us it is one of our major recruiting tools, with 90 % of new members saying they have used the website as a base for their information gathering about the brigade prior to coming down and applying to join.
For many brigades the expense of getting someone to setup a decent website and host it can be justified if it brought a few new members into the brigade, it can however be hard to try and get some of the less techno savvy members to understand that though.
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has anyone thought of setting up a facebook account as a way of having a web page with out havin g an actual web page??
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Facebook is Not that good as when its busy its very slow and theer are always problems trying to access site's on there..Facebook already has a number of fire brigade's on there.....Matt nothing wrong with your brigade site......
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hhhmmm ive never had any problems accessing it or being slow...might be ur interent connection
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Matt nothing wrong with your brigade site......
Actually there is a lot wrong with it Bill, but it still meets it's aim of being quick to load and reasonably well updated, thanks anyway for the kind words.
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CFS firey you obviously have a lot of time on your hands, and looking at those website you suggested makes me think your one of those firefighters who loves those new hospital style fire stations and the new clean cut plastic trucks, i hate nothing more then fire brigade related things such as stations, trucks, websites, what ever that have no special touch of that brigade and it's history, those websites are so boring and have no individuality at all.
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joff the web site is great, a job well done with all the history etc.
think the most important aspect is the info is regularly updated, as is m/vales and i think that is more important then what it looks like. nothing worse then brigade web sites with outdated info
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I like it, at least it's worth looking at, not like some other brigade sites that just say stuff like "Safety first, come home safe", it's the official CFS websites job to say all the required stuff, the brigade websites should be showing off thier gear to the community they are in.