€3m For This...

ChippingSodbury

http://www.ireland.com has launched as the new tourism website for Ireland. It has cost €3m to develop :eek:
Aside from that, either I'm completely thick or it's brutal and impossible to find anything.

Nice pics but hey, if I'm a tourist, I want to find out how to spend my money, not scratch my head wondering how to navigate around the site.

Or maybe it's because I'm not viewing it on a tablet :rolleyes:

Specifically designed with touch-based tablets in mind, the site replaces discoverireland.com which was built in 2006 before social media, smart phones and tablets became commonplace.

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/breaking/2013/0123/breaking54.html

smash

It doesn't work properly... I guess some people just love to be screwed over.

squod

Shit. It's Homer Simpsons webpage

TwoShedsJackson

It's awful, I can't find the Atari Jaguar option on the poll.

ChippingSodbury

Lucky they didn't get me to develop it: I can't even spell fantastic in the poll!!!

Bad Santa

ChippingSodbury wrote: »

Probably because I'm not viewing it on a tablet

Yup, I've just popped an E and it looks well mental.

Real Life

looks like it was made for windows 8,
3 million is rediculous though.

ChippingSodbury

TwoShedsJackson wrote: »

It's awful, I can't find the Atari Jaguar option on the poll.

Try searching for it on ireland.com (and come back to us next year!)

Jaggy

This is depressing.

Bits_n_Bobs

It just doesn't work. At all.

smash

No... they outsourced to the UK instead... "the contract to design the new Ireland.com site was given to a UK agency"

jameshayes

I like it - a little bit childish but good otherwise

ITS_A_BADGER

Black screen?

Duckworth_Luas

ChippingSodbury wrote: »

http://www.ireland.com

Irish Times is really gone to fcuk!

the purple tin

Looks like it was designed 10 years ago and shelved until now. Horrible.

Herb Powell

How many people did they pay to do this, exactly? €3 million is gone far beyond taking the piss and into the realm of depressing

4zn76tysfajdxp

The cloudy, overcast photo on the front screen doesn't exactly scream "extremely fun holiday" to me.

yeppydeppy

I can't even view it with IE9, it's just a black screen and no matter what you say IE is still the most used browser out there. Had a look using chrome and it's not too bad but seems a bit slow loading pages, they mustn't have spent much of the budget on backend hardware.

Czarcasm

smash wrote: »

It doesn't work properly... I guess some people just love to be screwed over.

If that's their idea of a mobile or tablet optimised site, I hope they kept the receipt for the €3m. It's chronic slow to load, and loads up a black page on top of the html so I'm assuming that's meant to be some sort of a placeholder for flash content which puts a fierce load on your phone or tablet.

I managed to see some placeholders too for dropdown boxes before the black screen kicked in. Are they for real? Dropdown anything is painful on a touch device. I have an awful feeling that page is full of unnecessary and useless code and ridiculous formatting.

They could've just wrapped it in an app and released it for iphone and android that way and then you could navigate through the options without the chronic delays. I can't see any tourist using this, instead relying on a travel app already on their phone or tablet instead.

smash

yeppydeppy wrote: »

no matter what you say IE is still the most used browser out there.

No it's not. Do your research.

ChippingSodbury

smash wrote: »

No it's not. Do your research.

It's used by a lot of people: aren't they welcome in Ireland as tourists anymore?

Bad Santa

Davian Ambitious Prison wrote: »

The cloudy, overcast photo on the front screen doesn't exactly scream "extremely fun holiday" to me.

For screaming photos I'd say you'd need to have dropped some LSD to have that kind of experience on the website to be fair.

jameshayes

yeppydeppy wrote: »

I can't even view it with IE9, it's just a black screen and no matter what you say IE is still the most used browser out there. Had a look using chrome and it's not too bad but seems a bit slow loading pages, they mustn't have spent much of the budget on backend hardware.

smash wrote: »

No it's not. Do your research.

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

Chrome = nearly 47%

Jaggy

smash wrote: »

No... they outsourced to the UK instead... "the contract to design the new Ireland.com site was given to a UK agency"

This just makes it even worse. Not even money that has gone into an Irish agency.

smash

ChippingSodbury wrote: »

It's used by a lot of people: aren't they welcome in Ireland as tourists anymore?

The site does work in IE 9. I checked.

The bottom line on this site is that in an age of very high res monitors and responsive design for tablet/mobile, the fúcking morons in our government forked out 3 million euro for something which only fills around 15% of my screen with info. They are weapons grade morons!!!!

_Puma_

One click and I was lost!

Czarcasm

I can't check how it looks in safari or chrome right now, but I just took a screen grab on my mobile opera browser. It seems like they're trying to convey the idea to tourists that Ireland is just a black hole. Not the best idea for promoting tourism-

Frynge

Also the information on it is not fully up to date.

I think that is the least one could expect from €3m.

jester77

The navigation is a bit like asking for directions down the country.

Frynge

jester77 wrote: »

The navigation is a bit like asking for directions down the country.

ye, you have to know your way already.

Herb Powell

jester77 wrote: »

The navigation is a bit like asking for directions down the country.

YEah, Bavarian accents are pretty fuccked alright

CrinkElite

I don't see what the problem is apart from the price tag. It's quite a nice site actually (firefox). Three or four clicks and I was looking at a list of hostels in Galway

yeppydeppy

smash wrote: »

No it's not. Do your research.

Alright, relax, it's in second place so is it? Either way even if it's dropped down to third a lot of people still use it, especially older people who are tourist types for the likes of Ireland.

smash

Oh god it's not even responsive in any way on a mobile....

ITS_A_BADGER

3 million and its not even viewable on popular internet browsers, nice going Tourism Ireland

Poster Boy

I am just after reading that this overpriced job wasn't even given to an Irish firm, but the site was imported from the UK. Just wrong on so many levels.

Circa 33% of all external tourist visits to Ireland have Dublin as their only intended destination. Despite this only 6% of Tourism Ireland's marketing budget is spent on promoting Dublin.

It is in the interests of anybody on this island who wishes to see tourism prosper that Dublin acts as an attractive gateway to the rest of the isle, as it is now increasingly the main air hub. This is apart from the fact that it has more attractions within a limited geographical area, comprises of 50% of the national population, and therefore makes sense to market.

The recently established "Tourism Recovery Taskforce" has representatives from many different sectors on it, including Belfast City Council. And yet guess what, Dublin is not represented on it.

Coincidentally, I note when one clicks "Destinations" on the new Ireland.Com website, the first 15 options include Antrim, Belfast, Cork and other destinations. It is only if one clicks "next" that an option for Dublin emerges.

In the article on the Indo's website, Niall Gibbons CEO of Tourism Ireland states "It's less than 10pc of our marketing budget." If this is the way they spend our money it seems clear to me that it needs to be re-appropriated and such people let go from their jobs.

Another expensive, fine days work by Irish authorities who increasingly give little cause for one to have confidence.

Celly Smunt

looks like they've tried to emulate the new windows tab style,badly.

Andy-Pandy

My guess is most of that money was spent on the Domain name.

Edit:A quick google shows that €495k was spent on it, what it gods name was the other 2.5 million spent on

smash

Andy-Pandy wrote: »

My guess is most of that money was spent on the Domain name.

Only a sixth of it...

3ndahalfof6

Did they not use the voting machines to create it, but if not, sure it will give them the oppertunity to put 2 more sub sectors in place to fix it (make it user friendly), creating more jobs.

Jaggy

Andy-Pandy wrote: »

My guess is most of that money was spent on the Domain name.

500k for the domain name, bought from Irish times. So it's still a horribly overpriced website.

sfwcork

Im looking at it on an Ipad

Its funky but some links dont actually work

TouchingVirus

Czarcasm wrote: »

I can't check how it looks in safari or chrome right now, but I just took a screen grab on my mobile opera browser. It seems like they're trying to convey the idea to tourists that Ireland is just a black hole. Not the best idea for promoting tourism-

To be fair you're using Opera Mini. Opera...

Duggy747

For a layout like that, it sure looks dull and drab with that baby scutter green palette up against a static jpeg.

Celly Smunt

They could have just played it simple for a lot less if they did something like this

Czarcasm

TouchingVirus wrote: »

To be fair you're using Opera Mini. Opera...

No there's opera mini and opera mobile. I said just for giggles I'd see if it loads on the native Nokia browser (Oh hush ), and for a site supposed to be optimised for mobile and tablet viewing, everything is all placeholders, nothing resizes or wraps, it's like they borrowed the style from an old photoshop template. It's still as slow as dogs too-

Poster Boy

Well I've heard that there's a recovery in the property market.

Maybe I could interest the same suckers government in buying a really useful website regarding that.

Call it "MyBlackHole.ie" and we'll settle for €50 million lids. Job done. :pac:

3ndahalfof6

Poster Boy wrote: »

Well I've heard that there's a recovery in the property market.

Maybe I could interest the same suckers government in buying a really useful website regarding that.

Call it "MyBlackHole.ie" and we'll settle for €50 million lids. Job done. :pac:

And there in lies the problem, we don't need lids, just ubber storage costs.

BobbyPropane

Don't think the design cost that much

SEO would cost a **** load and the website had to be translated into 11 languages so 3 million does not seem so bad .

Design isn't great though.

Sky King

The aesthetics are very mid-naughties and the functionality seems to be very clunky - not slick at all. You click on something and a random image pops up for like 2 seconds and you think 'oh that looks nice' then it wobbles a bit and then disappears without a trace and something else comes up.

karma_

Hard to believe they used the L word for Derry.