Jersey.com - new site removed

Last Thursday, ten days after it went live, Jersey Tourism took the decision to remove the disastrous new jersey.com website and revert back to the old site. Today, Tourism's chief David de Carteret issued the following statement to the industry:

"I am writing to provide you with an update on the status of jersey.com following some difficulties which we have been experiencing in moving to the new site. The current position is that we are maintaining the old site whilst further work is being undertaken to ensure the quality and functionality of the new. When we are totally confident in all operational aspects, the new site will be introduced.

Unfortunately the new site still has too many bugs to risk live operation during a busy period and with the new television campaign being launched on Boxing Day it is essential that we delay to ensure that the booking engines and links to commercial sites are operational. We very much regret having had to make this decision particularly after the fanfare of the launch of the new site in November .

We are confident that the problems can be resolved and that the new site will be introduced within the next few weeks."

First of all - some credit is due to David and his team for biting the bullet and recognising the need to put the consumer first. However in due course there will need to be a full enquiry into the handling of the project which has clearly been poorly managed right from the initial decision to award the project to a London agency. At least we can be certain that visitors to jersey.com will be able to see the information they need.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

It is normally good practice to set a team of people (not just staff or the developers) to test a new website. The aim is to try and spot the faults before roll out. I was surprised to see it suddenly change from a preview to the real thing. Even at the preview stage things were not working properly with some cross browser incompatibilities and pages not working correctly.

Lets hope no one at tourism had signed off the project as completed!

Unknown said...

Robert: where's the Tourism carol gone? I'm getting complaints on my blog because it's no longer there - it's my favourite blog of 2007.

Anonymous said...

The site is back up I see. At least the maps aren't as confusing as they were ... but they are out of date. The Tourism building is still shown at the Weighbridge and apparently there is a bowling alley on the site of the JFSC!!

How long ago was Funland demolished?