The Queen of England Unveils Her New Website

By Steve Delahoyde on February 13, 2009 9:01 AM

Speaking of England, as we were earlier this morning, and changing things over there, Her Majesty the Queen just rolled out a newly redesigned website. Constructed by the firm Bang Communications who have said they wanted to clean up the site, now in its third update since its launch in 1997, and make it more informative, accessible, and interesting. And in the premiere of the new site, the Queen was on hand to play around with it on a gigantic screen (alongside World Wide Web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee who was also at the event). But not everyone is pleased with the update, like the Times‘ Technology Editor Nigel Kendall, who says that there is still quite a bit left to be done with it before it’s finished and that its navigation is currently somewhat clumsy. Yet, to present both sides, Kendall also decides that it would be a good idea to get a quote about it from a competitor of the company that got the job, which doesn’t seem entirely fair to either Bang nor the winning competition:

Mark Wilson, a director of Wilson Fletcher, a rival web design specialist whose clients include The Science Museum and Discovery Channel, was less than complimentary about the new site.

“It’s very disappointing,” he told The Times. “I don’t think this expresses how we feel about our monarchy at all. It feels more like a library to me. I really thought that they would do something more progressive this time, try to get under the skin of what the monarchy means. This looks more like a set of Google search results and involves wading through huge amounts of text.”