It’s with more than a little surprise that we received a press release from the Isle of Wight council a couple of days ago saying how well their iWight Website did during the ups and down of the snow disruption.
The common reaction we had heard was the exact opposite – that when people wanted to know what was going on with school or road closures, the iWight site couldn’t cope, and they were met with blank pages, rather than the information they needed to see.
Press Office frantically updating
We know that the information was being frantically updated onto the site by the Communications / Press Office team (Simon Butler and Anna Price should get a special mention) because we saw it flooding into us via email (as we couldn’t get access to the iWight site either).
iWight servers let us down
What let them and the Island down was the public just weren’t able to access the Website – perhaps because the servers couldn’t cope, or there just wasn’t enough bandwidth available to the servers. Either way, it’s clear that the proper planning hadn’t been made for high levels of Web traffic.
As Tim Hunter-Henderson, Cabinet member responsible for customer service and communications said, “The Internet is a very important tool for getting information out to the public, especially in times when residents want important news about their child’s school or information regarding which roads are clear.” Quite.
Good for us :)
This of course leads Island people to turn to other Websites to find out the vital information – which was great for us (and a big hello goes to our new readers on the Blog, Facebook and Twitter!) and for the “Emergency Information for the Isle of Wight” Facebook group that was setup to cover the problems.
What would happen in a real emergency?
It does make you wonder quite how the Island would have found out this information if other media sources hadn’t stepped up to the job and delivered it for the council. Or indeed, what would happen in a serious emergency.
Let’s hope the council learns from this experience and carries out the necessary upgrades.
