andreasviklund.com

The first weekend in February is coming up soon, and it is once again time for the great winter market in Jokkmokk. The market which has been arranged almost every year for more than 400 years, is the biggest event of its kind in northern Sweden. At the great 400-year anniversary last year, more than 80.000 people visited Jokkmokk during the market. That is incredibly much, since Jokkmokks is a really small town (population: 3.500)…

Just like last year, I will be a part of it all. My music studio (anyone remember Baygroove Productions?) is located in the same building as the tourist information - which is the central point of the market area. Last year, I kept the doors to the studio open, so anyone who were curious about music production were welcome to visit me and play with the synths and machines. It turned out to be a success, the studio was crowded during the entire market. But I recently decided to close the studio, take a break from music production and put more energy on web design and other projects, so for this year things will be a bit different!

I have invited Lars Json Nutti, a well-known local artist who make absolutely amazing paintings, to show his work in the studio. We spent all afternoon today converting the electronic music production studio into an art gallery! Showing art will be a new experience, and I really look forward to opening the doors on Thursday…

And like last year, I will be blogging from the market so that people who live in other parts of the world can follow our adventures in Jokkmokk during the week. I will of course use the "jokkmokk" category for this, so anyone interested in live reports can subscribe to the RSS feed (see the archive for feed url). I will do it like I did last year, with photos, videos and texts during all times of the day. This means that there will of market-related posts during this week, but once the market is over I will be back with the regular subjects again.

I did the same thing last year. The market blog from 2005 was visited by thousands of people each day of the market, and a lot of people came to my studio only to write a blog post of their own or to send greetings to family and friends in other parts of the world. I got hundreds of e-mails during the market week, so I know that it was appreciated. But from the e-mail feedback I learned something else too, and that was that people did not like the official market website.

Since the official site has always been really bad, I reported this success to the arrangers and suggested them to run a blog of their own on the official market website for the 2006 market. I told them that it would be amazing to give people the chance to make a virtual visit to Jokkmokk and experience the market through the website - but also to let market visitors write greetings that the rest of the world could see on the website. After all, that is not hard to do. I also suggested that they should add a photo stream, a few interviews, some press releases, maybe a podcast or some videos, and regular news reports from the market. I even offered myself to create and maintain a new official market website with these features for free!

But good ideas are only good if they come from the right person. And appearently, I was not the right person to build a website - or even suggest website improvements. The site owners declined my offer, and a few months later they paid a huge amount of money to a non-local company which created a new official website for the market. I was still happy about this, since I expected an amazing site because of its high cost. But once I saw it, it was a big disappointment…

Nothing had really changed, the site is still not good. It is totally static, and built in an unprofessional and outdated way with a massive nested table layout and no kind of optimization. Huge blocks of code are commented out, and believe it or not, there are 29(!) images on the frontpage. How many of them can you spot? CSS is only used to style the links, and the HTML is not even close to being standards-compliant. Index.html gives 125 errors in the validator, which pretty much says it all. As for accessibility, the new site doesn't even live up to the WCAG single-A rating or the Section 508 guidelines, which is something I would DEMAND from any site that is built by a professional designer today. The lack of search engine optimization (not one meta tag or header in sight), interactivity (not even a contact form) and the initial load size of 162856 bytes makes the whole thing really sad. But atleast there are a couple of exciting animated .gif advertisements to enjoy, hooray…

But why do I care about this? It is their mistake and not mine, and I didn't need to spend several days on building a site without getting paid for the work. But I still wish I had, because of one simple reason: I would have built a much better website than the one they have now. That is a simple fact. No matter how the comparisations would be made, the free website that I would have built for them would still have been better than their current site which they paid a lot to get. And even though noone will ever want to admit it, that means that all the money that was spent on this new website were totally wasted. Hopefully the arrangers will realize it some day and listen to me next time I talk about websites. After all, it is one of few things that I know really, really well. And my offer still stands: I will build a new site for the market next year if they let me do it. And I would still do it for free. The winter market is an amazing event, and it deserves an amazing website…

By the way, the same offer goes for the official website of Jokkmokk, which really needs to be rebuilt now. It has looked exactly the same for more than seven years, so a total reconstruction is definitely needed. I have promised to build that site for free as well, and still include the full functionality of a commercial enterprise-level CMS into the site to make sure that it will work for all its users and visitors. I know what kind of features and functionality that is needed for a site of this size and type, and I have both the skills and the tools to to the job. And since I am the only professional web designer in the Jokkmokk area who can write standards-compliant code, I don't feel bad about saying that I think I am the right person to do the job…

But I know my hometown and the lack of technical knowledge among the people who make the decisions. Many people believe that the more expensive a website is, the better it must be. I can understand that, because it isn't easy to know for someone who don't know webdesign. But I really, really hope that they listen to me before they make the decision, so I can explain how it really works. It will save them a lot of money.

But enough whining, this post is way too long already! Tomorrow will be spent on finishing the gallery and the small teahouse that I will have in the second room of the studio. According to the official program, I will open on Wednesday. I won't. I will open on Thursday. But I will start reporting about the market from tomorrow. See you then!