Hello
I can't read the London & Continental Railways website and they have no
email address to complain to. I tried calling them, but got put through to
one guy who hung up, and another who had voicemail. Does anyone know how to
contact them?
http://www.lcrhq.co.uk/
What I want to tell them is that I have an automatic press release
monitoring program, Marvin, which tracks press releases for over 80
companies and organisations in the rail business, mostly in Europe and North
America.
Many of these companies have poor websites, but I can often have Marvin work
around this. Not so with London & Continental Railways, because their
website is completely done in Flash, and there is no text version or any
html pages at all, except the one single page which contains their Flash
animation.
To my knowledge, Flash is not an official web standard, so I will not have
Marvin learn Flash. In addition, the blinking lights and spinning logos at
the LCR website can be done with html + javascript. This eliminates the need
to make the website inaccessible to those who are unable or unwilling to use
a Flash client reader. The advantage of removing this hurdle is generally
applicable, but particularly to those connecting over a mobile phone network
or a conventional modem, as well as people like me trying to monitor
content.
Catering to these people is obviously in the interest of any organisation
wishing to have people read about what they are doing. Another disadvantage
with an all-flash website is that you can't send a link to a particular page
to a friend over email. This is exactly the problem Marvin is encountering
while trying to monitor LCR.
Removing html content in favour of Flash harkens back to the bad old days of
incompatible diskettes and file formats. It is also similar to installing
steps on concourses which previously were wheelchair- and
suitcase-accessible.
I would be most grateful if this message could be forwarded to the LCR
website guys.
--
Erik Sandblom
my site is EriksRailNews.c om
for those who don't believe, no explanation is possible
for those who do, no explanation is necessary