Minister for Everything launches "Newsspeak" website

Did anyone notice the media relase Smyth put out?

Pretty funny…

I’d start at the tail.

hehe, didn’t take me long to google an image of a donkey head, easier to airbrush into something conventional than the comrades 🙂

Maelinar,
It would have taken you an additional half-day to airbrush and otherwise modify Stanhope’s features to a ‘G’ classification however. Assuming you hadn’t freaked out in the doing of it…

As a webmaster, I could throw that together pretty quickly.

Hardly any DHTML/Flash/JScript evident, only HTML linking documents.

I would have charged pebbles for that (stuff of that quality I do as a hobby), although since I was selling to government I would have tripled my price.

Economical reuse of graphics too…

Professionally I’d reasonably assume I could throw that together in a day, given that media releases come preformatted and it’s cut and paste stuff.

Airbrushing/Photoshopping the banners would take the longest time, only because I’d be umming and aahing over what colour to make it.

Then again the banners are single photo cuts as well. One afternoon with a digital camera would do the trick.

Overall, not a good site, no dynamics, no bells and whistles. I give it a 2/10 – a preteen computer geek could have produced this.

Having checked out the new site last night, my main comment is that I was completely unnerved by having Stanhope’s face staring out at me the whole time. Didn’t matter how many times I changed pages, the background would change but Stanhope would still be there watching me.
K

Probably a lot more than it should have.

Sorry Brendan, but afterall, the comrade is the Prime Minister of Canberra.

I just can’t see the big issue here, given that HTML direct coding can be learned in about 15 minutes, and if you use a prog like frontpage, dreamweaver etc it’s all done for you.

I don’t think this one would have made waves in the great pool of taxpayer money quite frankly, although if it did I would be quite surprised, and irate.

Anybody know how much it cost ?

Well the site is nothing special, the ALP should have been able to design it themselves with the resources of their members.

but i’m confident a well padded contract to a mate was involved.

The site itself is reasonably effective, even if it is downright peculiar to have Mr. Stanhope’s face on his minister’s media releases.

The real question is why not refresh the content on the existing cmd site rather than create a whole new one?

I suspect inccompetence.

In any event, we await improved timeliness with bated breath. it only took until 2005 for the ACT Government to put out media released in html!

There’s also this release out from the Liberals complaining about said new website. Brendan Smyth’s main complaint is that it was made using taxpayers’ money when we’re in a deficit. But he also says:

“This is a nonsense. Never before in the history of self-government has one Chief Minister been so full of self-importance to want to use taxpayers’ dollars to promote themself on a web page.

“I realise that the Prime Minister has a Prime Minister’s Home Page which is funded and overseen by the Office of Prime Minister and Cabinet, but John Howard is after-all the Prime Minister of Australia.

K