As someone who does a fair amount of work on GUI’s for users, I know how important a good looking as well as functional website is. iMod has brought to my attention the latest disaster to come from government.

In November last year IEC chief information officer, Libisi Maphanga, said that the organisation planned to spend R3 million to fix the website which was inaccessible to computer users not using Microsoft Windows or Internet Explorer.

Maphanga said that the organisation, which oversees elections in the country, would spend R3 million to make its website accessible to all Internet users.
Today the IEC website is available to all users and the error message that previously infuriated users has been removed

[myBroadband]

This frustrates me endlessly. R3,000,000 for that? First of all, it fails the W3C Validation Service horribly. Why is this such a big thing to mention? There is actual legislation for 1st world countries whereby websites designed for government must meet certain standards. The fact that the new election site fails the validator so badly means people with screen readers and the like won’t actually be able to use the website. This is huge when they are trying to market the site as a resource for the upcoming elections.

Think the election website is bad? Have a look at some of his personal work – http://southafrica2010.co.za/. At a time when a presence on the internet is crucial, how can things like this get by? I don’t care much for the soccer site, that’s not an official site of any kind, but what was the selection process about?

Surely they had a myriad of proposals to go through, and if they did and this is the best, they need to start looking elsewhere for design. South Africa is not short of amazing web designers such as Damien du Toit and Stonewall.

All I want to know, is how did this happen? Can anyone shed some light on this?

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