I'm sure that, inspired by the vibrant brand message of the London 2012 Olympics, all of you are regular readers of the London 2012 website. You'll remember the site's clean crisp design, with plain white background and understated layout. Well not any more. The website's gone the same way as the much-loved 2012 logo, and is now a vision in edgy pink. And that electric light blue colour. And a bit of yellow and orange. It's cutting edge, it's street style and it's well down with da yoof. They're going to adore it, should they ever think to visit.
Of course, when any website upgrades there are always teething problems. Sidebars that don't quite say what you want, links that catapult readers to the wrong location, and malfunctioning databases displaying not quite the right information in not quite the right place. That's why you beta test any website before you put it up live, and why you check every possible interaction thoroughly before the public are allowed in. The website of London's premier sporting bid would never make such elementary errors, would they?
Here's one of my favourite pages on the new site. It's this month's "news archive" page, where each of August's media reports will be filed away. Except that the page has been labelled "August 2008". Only 12 months out, guys. It's an easy mistake to make, and so elementary that I'm sure someone will have rectified the error well before you get round to clicking on the page to view it.
And then there's the London 2012 blog - a well-managed stream of first-person updates related to all aspects of the approaching Olympics and Paralympics. That's gone very pink indeed. There are lots of tags, because tags are very 2.0 (with "Culture" a completely different tag to "culture", apparently). Now you have to click to read each post, and to see any relevant photographs, whereas previously the whole post appeared on the main page. Individual posts used to kick off with a thumbnail photo of the author, but all of these have suddenly vanished. Text now flows in oh-so skinny columns down the right-hand edge of photos, and captions have become detached from the image they describe. To top it all, the blog's new RSS feed is trapped two months in the past. It's not quite online nirvana, alas.
More seriously, all of the blog's comments have vanished. Every single one of them. There weren't too many comments before, not least because you had to register before you could leave one. And what comments there were felt a bit clean and sanitised, but they were still a legitimate means of responding to a civic project of international importance. No longer. You can read, but not reply. This disappearance may just be a temporary error. Certainly the blog still displays a link to "commenting guidelines". And, if you scan down the sidebar, there's a link to "recent comments". Except there are only two, and they all seem to be part of a test post dated "Jan 1 2009". Hmmm. Another error, surely, that's accidentally slipped past the relaunched site's army of debuggers.
The site also suffers from that perennial problem of any "back to the drawing board" relaunch, which is that most of the URLs have changed. I've linked to several London 2012 pages from this blog before, and suddenly almost all of those links are broken. This link to the Aquatics Centre - broken. This link to the Olympic Delivery Authority - broken. Even the link in my sidebar to the 2012 blog has broken, because the web designers have changed its URL from blog.london2012.com to london2012.com/blog. I'm sure that the new address is a better match to agreed website naming conventions, but it currently has zero brand awareness and will have to build up its online linkage from scratch.
So, there are only three possible conclusions to be drawn. i) the web designers on the London 2012 site haven't got their act together ii) the new London 2012 website has been launched before it was ready iii) both of the above
Never mind, it's only us geeky Londoners who've noticed so far. The world won't be arriving on the 2012 website for another 5 years, and there's plenty of time to build dynamic online brand perfection before then.
I'm sure that, inspired by the vibrant brand message of the London 2012 Olympics, all of you are regular readers of the London 2012 website. You'll remember the site's clean crisp design, with plain white background and understated layout. Well not any more. The website's gone the same way as the much-loved 2012 logo, and is now a vision in edgy pink. And that electric light blue colour. And a bit of yellow and orange. It's cutting edge, it's street style and it's well down with da yoof. They're going to adore it, should they ever think to visit.
