The Mission-On website
Bernard Hickey (and his teenage daughter!) review the $11.4 million Mission-On website.
Now let’s look at the performance. Sparc kindly provided me with some statistics on traffic for Mission-On, which was built on contract by a private company called Click Suite. It generated 39,132 unique browser sessions in June and has registered 15,000 kids in the four months since it launched. Sparc is targeting 30,000 by June next year. Sparc pointed out that Click Suite had told them this compared quite well with www.cleo.co.nz, www.247girl.co.nz, C4TV.co.nz and Kidspot.co.nz.
At this point I will mention that the official Neilsen Net Ratings for this blog in a month (and Neilsen are very conservative with their stats) are around four times their 39,132. In fact I get more than that in a week. And alas no $11 million of taxpayer funding.
I registered for the website as myself and tried to play a few games to get a feel for it. It’s the worst kind of patronising tosh I have seen in a long time. “It’s choice,” the website says of itself. It has one game called a “Creative Hip Hop Challenge”. One thing I do know about successful websites is they have to be driven by the users and not appear out of touch or preachy or just plain dumb. This is all three.
Ouch.
It’s also all built in Adobe (formerly Macromedia’s) Flash. Anyone trying to build a website that is picked up by Google and the other bots so people can find it knows that Flash is the dumbest way to do that. Adobe is only now giving Flash the ability to attract search engines. Flash is fantastic for making good-looking websites that make their owners look good in the eyes of their bosses. But they are websites that aren’t either popular or profitable. Flash sites are typically built by advertising, marketing or design agencies (like Clicksuite), who make advertisement or brochure sites.
But that is okay – the taxpayer will then be asked to spend money promoting the site.
So I asked my 14-year-old daughter what she thought of it. She had seen an ad for it on the side of a bus, but hadn’t visited. I asked her to check it out. She did what everyone does now. She typed the words “Mission On” into Google to find it. It came up at number 8 in the natural search rankings. Any web professional knows this is a disaster. I suspect it ranks so poorly because it is made in Flash and its search optimisation is woeful. It is also poorly ranked because few other sites have to linked to it, which is an ominous sign. My daughter eventually found it.
We are in fact already paying for adverts for it.
“Oh My God,” she yelped. “It’s all in Flash. I just never use Flash sites. You can’t navigate them, they’re usually just so crap. My browser is set to block these yucky pop-ups. No. No. No,” she said before shooing me out the door. I’m a very lucky father to have a daughter who knows so much more about web usability than I do.
Heh.
PS. One tip for Sparc. It needs to buy the Google ad word for MissionOn to create a sponsored link. It costs about 25 cents per click. Well worth the money. So good in fact that I’ve bought the MissionOn adword for Google and will link to this story once it’s published.
Now that is just evil. Very very evil. I love it.
July 11th, 2008 at 12:06 pm
Crickey DPF – you’re giving coverage to Bernard Hickey? Well at least it isn’t one of his economic or political “punditry” pieces I guess.
[DPF: And for the second time in five minutes PJM ignores anything resembling analysis or an argument. Not even a second rate troll really. At best third rate]
July 11th, 2008 at 12:15 pm
Jeepers Roger, thanks to Bernard and DPF the MissionOn site will probably now get double the amount of hits as everyone goes to have a laugh at it. You can them use these new unique browser numbers to tell the media how well the site is working
July 11th, 2008 at 12:22 pm
He lets you talk crap here gnome so what are you bitching about?
Don’t push your luck or someone will set a 14 year old girl on to you and you’ll get your ass kicked.
July 11th, 2008 at 12:25 pm
“Not even a second rate troll really. At best third rate”
Too bad, I was aiming for 5th rate. Redbaiter would have obliged.
July 11th, 2008 at 12:37 pm
Just ban the useless pinata David. Can’t be arsed wading through its drek to find the actually useful comments.
July 11th, 2008 at 12:54 pm
Just had a look at the site. OMG WE actually paid for something that bad.
July 11th, 2008 at 1:01 pm
In the last 48 hours we have received 2 clicks from 689 page impression giving CTR:0.29% at average cost of $0.36 with average position 3.1 for Google Adwords: “Mission On” & “SPARC”.
Regards
Bryan Spondre
Bernards Link Whore
July 11th, 2008 at 1:27 pm
This kind of reckless waste of taxpayer dollars has to be stopped. Families are hurting in this country, and they just cannot any longer afford this kind of extravagant government expenditure.
People complain about the cost of petrol, and the cost of groceries, and they often ask for inquiries into the price structuring of such items. They need to start complaining about one other item they spend a lot of money on each week and that is government.
Its lucky for the wastrels who spend $11 million on this kind of worthless crap that the money to pay for it is taken from the pay packets of wage earners before they see it and by force, for they’d damn sure never get a cheque if they merely asked for it. Hard working NZ taxpayers have other priorities rather than the financial underpinning of the airy fairy schemes of arrogant big spending socialists and their cronyist mates.
Forget about the cost of petrol, and forget the cost of food, interest education, rent and all of those other essential items. The real drain on living standards and take home pay in this country is the cost of government. As someone said the other day, NZ should be running a Toyota style government, not a Rolls Royce. (its actually more than that, its Roll Royce style with solid gold door handles and diamond insets). No longer can NZ workers be asked the pay the cost of this financially ravenous monolithic troglodytic beast. Cut taxes and cut government. Now.
July 11th, 2008 at 1:44 pm
Just tried to have a look. On cheap broadband, so still waiting for flash to load… This site is aimed at helping fat NZ kids, which are in all honesty more common in poor households. That means dial-up internet or cheap, slow broadband (unless they are completely squandering their benefit money). It also means older computers that can’t access the latest techno-wizzy sites. So not only is the site expensive, much of the target audience can’t even access it!
I have waited for 5 min for it to load and am now giving up. And my connection isn’t too bad, I can use you-tube.
July 11th, 2008 at 1:46 pm
It’s odd that McDonalds gives out pedometers to kids to educate them on walking and energy used whilst the government builds a website with games to tell educate them on being more active.
It’s responsibile parents demanding better of their children and the companies that sell goods to their children (directly and indirectly) that improves the nations health, not preaching. The money would be better spent on higher quality PE classes amongst many other things.
July 11th, 2008 at 1:57 pm
So you sit in front of a computer….and it makes you active??? That’s like saying commenting on a blog is doing work.
July 11th, 2008 at 2:00 pm
“Crickey DPF – you’re giving coverage to Bernard Hickey? Well at least it isn’t one of his economic or political “punditry” pieces I guess.
[DPF: And for the second time in five minutes PJM ignores anything resembling analysis or an argument. Not even a second rate troll really. At best third rate]”
All the left ever want to do is destroy the moral authority of the right. That is what Nome is trying to do with his scornful comment on Bernard Hickey. Take note readers- you’ll see them doing it time after time after time. They have no counter argument. They have no alternative ideas. They have no answer to any real challenge to the mindless religious doctrine that underpins their thinking. All they can ever come up with is disparagement and slander and hate driven attacks designed to destroy the credibility of their opponent.
They want to destroy the moral authority of anyone who is a threat to their hold on power. From Helen Klark to Roger Nome, from Al Gore to Al Franken, from the Standard to Kiwiblogblog, the strategy is always the same. Attack the moral authority of the right.
Anyone the left perceive as a political opponent suffers the same fate- From Bernard Hickey to Fran O’Sullivan. From George Bush to Don Brash. From John Howard to John Key. Its always the same old same old. Dream up some cloudy false allegations and label the target as dishonest or unworthy.
That is the left’s prime strategy and it has been for some decades- destroy the moral authority of their political opponents. Hey people- Don’t let them keep having a lend of us with this cheap cowardly trick. What’s that old saying- fool me once…..??
July 11th, 2008 at 2:33 pm
Two Random Thoughts:
Cardigan roman sandal wearing dickheads grow in number daily and yet they cant even get a website right. Can we find out what the connection is between dear leader and the makers (or at least those who will receive payment for) this website. I smell another rort, no website can cost so much… leopards spots anyone!
Hmmmmm “a kid in sport stays out of court”…..well at least they’ll probably get high speed internet in the Milton Hilton. [maybe this could also apply to wee Tony]
July 11th, 2008 at 2:54 pm
Click Suite Limited was formerly known as Interactive! Limited.
The company’s directors are J.D. Donovan of 35 Weld St,, Emily M.H. Loughnan of 2 Hawkins Drive Martinborough and Phillip R. McIntosh who may be her partner. Phil and Emily each have a share, presumably to take advantage of shareholder salary allocations, and the other 98 (100 in total) shares are possibly held by a Family Trust. The registered office is at Grant Thornton’s, 80 The Terrace. I always look to see how efficiently they have filed their annual returns. This company have done that in a very proper manner since 1998.
To be fair, the Ministry of Economic Development’s web site for companies has improved considerably during the past eight years.
July 11th, 2008 at 3:14 pm
While a website to get kids active may seem like an oxymoron, it actually has some potential. I found out about this site months back when my 10 year old son told me about it. He’d found it through a friend, to whose house he usually goes to play online games at sites such as heavygames.com etc.
You can earn points by writing a short piece (only a paragraph or two) on some physical activity you’ve done, which others can then read. I seem to remember you could upload photos of your activity too. Kids that age get quite a kick out of seeing their stuff on such a website (which a 14 year old girl wouldn’t unless it were MySpace. Wrong age, probably wrong sex for a one person focus group, Bernard). So far, so good.
But then it all goes pear-shaped. The usability issues are just as others have described. Not just Flash, but Flash in a pop up. The “web dudes” at Clicksuite mustn’t have had enough sports drinks in their system when they devised that one. Then there’s the problem that (when I was there, anyway) the points don’t actually get you anything, except boasting rights. Kids these days are rewards-driven… and I don’t mean they should send them a chocolate bar when they reach the high score
But if amassing points allowed you to access additional site features, for instance, that’d incentivise some kids.
So it seems to me to have been an idea with some underlying potential ruined by one set of clowns who know nothing about their target audience (presumably the Ministry or their highly paid advisors) and another set of even bigger clowns who know nothing about web usability (Clicksuite). Most of what the site does can be achieved with scripting and DHTML, or is unnecessary.
Which is even sadder than if it were, as some seem to think, a crap idea from the beginning. Not only are they wasting our money, they’re wasting the idea’s potential.
July 11th, 2008 at 3:17 pm
Even better… the SPARC page that *does* come up first in Google for “Mission On” doesn’t even link to the site. Just PDF fact sheets and mission statements.
It sounds alright on the intro page, if seriously naff:
“This website is for kids who want to have some FUN!”… “Take off your serious face and let the fun begin!”
but then you have to wade through pages of T’s and C’s and legal jargon to join. And “you will need a parent or guardian with you” – doesn’t sound like much fun so far.
And yep… the rest of the site is just as bad. How much sports equipment does $11m buy? And why is getting kids to spend time on a website good for their fitness?
The only upside is that it’s so bad, kids won’t waste much time on it. I got so bored I went outside within about 5 mins. Though that was to have a ciggie
July 11th, 2008 at 3:56 pm
I would wonder whether this group are producing any other material for the Labour party. Perhaps at a knock-down rate, to go with what looks to be …umm…not cheap rates that were paid for this site.
July 11th, 2008 at 4:10 pm
$11million will buy you about 60 man-years worth of web development resource, at about $100 an hour.
Which is just astonishing. What did they spend all this time doing?
July 11th, 2008 at 4:45 pm
11 million wasted!!
July 11th, 2008 at 5:12 pm
60 man years. Lets see. 5 man years consulting every bozo known to man about how it should look. 5 man years building a content management architecture because we thought we needed one. $2 million on hardware because we didn’t want to outsource hosting. Umpteen gazillion dollars on weird arse “requirements” that whomever tendered this stuck into the contract because they once read a book on web design and thought they knew what they were doing.
I’ve worked government for long enough to know where the money disappears to. It isn’t too dissimilar to the Australian armed services – not happy to buy an off the shelf helicopter, had to build their own avionics. Because their needs were really really different from those of the US. It is also driven by procurement policies – you have to have an open tender. And your tender cannot say “Please quote to supply Sea Sprite helicopters.” It has to say “I’d like a helicopter capable of the following things:”. And from there the scope creep starts: “I’d like one that makes coffee. No, no, we’re Australians, it has to have a tap that dispenses XXXX. But if we drink XXXX when flying we’ll be unsafe, so it’ll have to have a really good autopilot. And Australian sand is quite different from that American sand – much redder. I’ll bet their terrain avoidance won’t work properly, we’ll write in a special requirement for red sand terrain avoidance.”
Yep, govt purchasing policies at their best.
July 11th, 2008 at 5:38 pm
>And Australian sand is quite different from that American sand – much redder. I’ll bet their terrain avoidance won’t work properly, we’ll write in a special requirement for red sand terrain avoidance.
So you’ve noticed this as well? When ever they buy off the shelf, the project turns out well. C17s for instance. When ever they decide that some local requirement means bespoke development, the project turns out badly. Collins submarines being an example, because the water surrounding Australia is so different to the water surrounding other countries. But they still insist on bespoke development.
Which I put down to a belief that building military equipment locally supports local jobs, even if it costs twice as much and arrives 10 years late. As opposed to just buying the equipment and paying for it by exporting something Australia does well. Like tourism or copper. The British have the same problems… they’ve spend a fortune on their own useless assault rifles on the basis that they’re creating an export industry, even if they’ve only ever exported them to Zimbabwe or somewhere. And I think they might have been given away as aid.
July 11th, 2008 at 6:50 pm
Yeah, if they were consciously doing it I could almost understand – whilst I don’t agree with protecting local jobs in that way, at least it would be a reason. Instead, I think it is unconscious incompetence. They don’t really even see that the process they invent leads to the outcome – they are all puzzled at how it happened.
If I want to buy a car, I go around all the car yards, pick the car I like the most, and buy it. But buying military hardware apparently isn’t like that, you need to issue an RFP for people to come and tell you what sort of hardware they have. And in order to be transparent and open, you need to write down your requirements before they come and define your selection criteria, so you can’t just take a bribe from someone to buy their kit. But if you send a bunch of bureaucrats off to write a list of requirements, they’ll just add a bell here, a whistle there, and while we’re at it we’ll point out that something that creates jobs for Australians would help your case, and by the way our sand is a different colour.
I think if I was running things I’d probably go the other way. Find a handful of people who were beyond reproach for whatever reason, get them to run a benchmarking exercise “which helicopters could be convinced to work for us, how much does each of them cost”. Then, buy the one with the best bang for your buck. I know that sounds overly simplistic, but I’ll be there are people in the Australian Navy who could have told you the best bang for your buck answer before the process even started. Like maybe some of the people who actually fly the things.
July 11th, 2008 at 7:48 pm
Where is the opposition on this little scam. National should be kicking up a shit storm. I hate to say it but the only thing that will save this country is a depression. This country could be a great forward thinking world leading outfit but what do we get for our dollar. Socialist come commie gravy sucking pigs that wouldn’t know how to earn a honest dollar even if it was to save their corrupt sorry arses.
July 11th, 2008 at 9:44 pm
Crikey Bruce, that’s easy. Just make sure you drink your XXXX inside. That way when you pass out flat on your face (or your arse, depending on which way you were staggering) you’ll hit the floor and not the sand. Mind you, Bruce, Bruce, Bruce and Bruce will probably end up falling on top of you, and you know what happens to Bruce if he passes out without having found his way to the dunny first, so you might wanna be wearing your Drizabone.
July 12th, 2008 at 11:38 am
Sorry but she is retarded. The main site is not in flash. Flash is used for many sites like this. I have a problem with about everything she says. She does not know what the hell she is talking about.
November 22nd, 2008 at 11:54 am
Pertinent Question: is the National Government going to cut this waste of a website free?