Fifield’s website goes down on first day as Comms Minister

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blog Spare a thought for Senator Mitch Fifield. Just as the new Communications Minister was being sworn in at Government House in Canberra this morning, his web developer was apparently updating his personal website with his new responsibilities.

Normally this wouldn’t be a problem, as these kinds of changes are typically made seamlessly — the new code is inserted and visitors start receiving the new content. However, this morning Fifield’s web developer apparently decided to take the whole site offline for a few moments.

All we can say is … bad timing, buddy — bad timing. Next time just quietly update the page without knocking the whole thing offline — especially when dozens of journalists are trying to look at it. You may also want to reconsider Windows 2008 as a hosting platform while you’re at it … it’s just slightly out of date.

Of course, we don’t appropriate any blame to Fifield himself for this situation — it’s clearly a technical glitch caused by a web developer in his employ. Not, however, the perfect look for a new Communications Minister on his first day.

11 COMMENTS

  1. Ironic to have your site go down when you’re getting the communications ministership. But to be fair the Server OS is largely determined by the hosting provider. The funny thing about the web design is how many of the Liberal members’ websites they do. http://www.dsis.com.au/Portfolio.aspx
    Iestimate over 100 Lib members’ pages in their portfolio. It explains to me why all these guys have virtually the same website.

  2. You may also want to reconsider Windows 2008 as a hosting platform while you’re at it … it’s just slightly out of date.
    lol do you realize how many companies are still using 2003. 2008 was a good platform its just 2013 is so much better.

  3. Interesting to note that the website is not responsive to mobile devices either. That should not be happening in 2015, even if the site was developed a few years back.

      • If you’ve got an existing set of websites that function just fine as is, who is going to pay for a complete re-do just so they can become responsive. Its an expensive deal. This is a political party not new age tech startup as well ;).

        Back in 2008/9 (looking at the hosts website I’d wager this is near when these sites/templates were done) I doubt ‘responsive’ was more than a twinkle in some far flung web-dev’s eye.

        Sure if they were to write these now then I’d say there’s some definite issues (also as to why the site needed an update to just even change a simple descriptive label … which likely these days ought to be content driven).

        The 2008 looks to be the hosting company’s deal and I guess they’re going with if it aint broke why upgrade it. (or I guess if the liberals won’t pay for the OS upgrade then it won’t happen either).

  4. “You may also want to reconsider Windows 2008 as a hosting platform ”

    s/2008//

    “You may also want to reconsider Windows as a hosting platform “

    • Well Delimiter has been Linux-only for a long time, so personally I kind of agree with that, although I do know a lot of people prefer Windows :)

  5. Yeah, I believe that looking at a politician’s websites does give a good clue on how that politician views technology. First impressions last!

  6. Its sort of worse if the company is managing 100 politicians pages and dont know how to do it properly.
    Im a web developer and know it all too well how easy it is to set it up so that there is 0 downtime.
    There are even low tech solutions in windows that you could employ which would lead to 0 downtime.
    You dont have to have 2 webservers behind a load balancer (or 2 AWS servers) to do it right.

    My advice to Mr Fifield would be to find a new company for his website because the current one is not performing.

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