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Sometimes the poor standard of so-called ‘professional body websites’ astonishes me.
I have, in the past, referred back to the FEBCA and CiB websites as prime examples of communication gone bad, in these cases, the communication inherent in the design. They are truly awful, and such professional bodies should be ashamed to hawk such incompetence in public. If communication should be exciting, dynamic, clear and effective, then they seem to take the exact opposite view in the way they communicate through their sites. And they claim to be communications professionals. I shudder.
Well, I’ve found another one. Check out the IPRA website. I think it is quite possibly the worst site I have ever seen, of any kind, ever. It looks like somethng put together by a five year old in the early 90s. But even that five year old would by now be well into teenage years and well enough advanced in basic website design and aesthetics to have updated it.
It’s difficult to know where to start with what’s bad about it. So instead I’ll list what’s good about it:
- It uses a lot of space.
That’s it. The graphics are bizarrely irrelevant. The colours are odd. There’s gross inconsistency of standards. The navigation’s weird. The page elements are not even lined up properly.
Their tagline on Google says “IPRA is the Internatiopnal [sic] Public Relatins [sic] Association – a membership organisation for PR professionals”. FFS.
Remember PR Disasters? Remember how I said it’s great because they analyse what’s bad about PR campaigns and so you get a unique insight into how not to do it? Well, do the same with the IPRA site – that is, do everything differently from their site, absolutely everything – and you’ll be fine.
So, do you want to join up? If you do, you’ll be in with the PR in-crowd but please, please ask them to do something about their site because as a PR professional I find it embarrassing on their behalf.
