Scotland has the fastest decreasing population in the whole of the recently expanded European Union. So the Scottish Executive have set up a ‘Fresh Talent’ initiative to encourage more people to live and work in Scotland. One part of this is a new website: Scottish Talent. I have many problems with it:

On first glance it’s a Flash-rich with lots of scrolling photographs and it all looks very nice. However, I’m not sure there are many people from the new countries in Europe who have sufficient internet capability to see this Flash version effectively. There is a fortunately a Low Graphics version (actually a Just Text With No Formatting version) which you can hunt for. But, with this latter version it doesn’t make Scotland seem very attractive. You need a balance of text and images. This site doesn’t have it.

The site itself has many usability errors:

• Some links on the home page are too ambiguous. What does ‘This Is The Time’ mean?
• The site is all in English. There are no alternative languages.
• Rollover text colouring is sometimes very close to the standard text colouring.
• Each section of content seems to have been designed by different people: Some rollover text goes light grey; other rollover text has a white underline; some menus have background colour changes; some links don’t have any rollover effect at all, and hence don’t appear to be links.
• The site is all in frames which means people cannot easily bookmark pages of interest. Anyhow, here’s the page for The Highlands.
• Notice anything odd about that page? No pictures. Actually there should be. There’s lots of HTML in the page that indicates different images along with other menu options. All sorts of extra stuff. Except I can’t see it except with my Camino web browser. Lovely. Another daft website only tested on Windows. When will people realise to develop and test with Macintosh and test with Windows?
• For those not using Camino on the Macintosh there is no useful navigation meaning that once you’ve dug down three levels or so, you cannot get back up without going back to the home page.

The site is also geared towards people that want to move here from other countries, hence it includes information (actually just links) regarding visas, work permits etc. But, what about other countries in the UK? I have lived most of my life in England and not once did I see anything promoting the value of moving to Scotland. Sure, you can visit Scotland for a holiday, but to live? Nothing. And Still Nothing. Let’s have some comparisons. Let’s persuade people to move here from England, Wales and Northern Ireland.