When things go wrong they always go wrong at the worst possible time.  A rather glum view but somehow it always works out to be true.  And it's certainly true for people responsible for controlling their organisations websites.

So last week would be a bad time for a link on the Dept. for Culture, Media and Sport (www.culture.gov.uk) with a title of process of a General Election (which links to a page on the www.parliament.uk website) to go wrong.  And if that link was on the Home page it would probably be noticed and fixed pretty quick, right ?  Well, actually this link first failed at around 1pm on Friday 7^th May - yes that's right, just around the time when everyone would be looking for any info they could find about elections and hung Parliaments.  It was eventually fixed a little over four and a half hours later.

There's a couple of things that are a little alarming about this.

From a culture.gov.uk view point, this link wasn't buried in the depths of their website - it was right there on the front page.  Now most sites use some sort of monitoring service to measure availability and performance of their sites and it would be strange if they didn't use their Home page for this like most organisations do.  To mitigate this a little, the problem with many of these services is that they only measure availability and performance and they don't check the quality of the page the site serves up. So you can end up serving up rubbish with 100% availability with superb performance when what is actually needed is something a little more sophisticated which checks that the page is OK as well.

Now, looking at this from the www.parliament.uk site, I'd say that a page covering how elections are run would be a pretty key page on their site.  And if someone decided to move or rename such a page then you'd expect them to put what's called a "redirect" in place so that if anyone has a link to the original page any clicks on those links will automatically be redirected to the new page.  This is normal practice and happens all the time.  And indeed that's exactly what they did four and a half hours after making the change to solve the problem.

The people at culture.gov.uk probably blissfully unaware that the problem existed because they didn't solve the problem - the people at www.parliament.uk did.

The truth is that at end of the day, or in this case late afternoon, neither set of people come out well in this.

And, of course, the problem occurred at one of the most inconvenient of times possible.