The Framers Forum

Well the usernames & passwords were only a day late but in all fairness they did work, unfortunatly for us non techheads the site is not all that user freindly & frankly is a tad messy

Out of interest, I just googled for websites by some of the London livery companies...

Worshipful Company of Furniture Makers
Opens with a succinct, excellent mission statement, clean and attractive layout with relevant photos, and entices the reader to explore further. As a visitor, this site gives me an impression that the furniture maker's guild is a professional body whose roots may be traditional, but who have clearly defined objectives and are relevant to today's world.

Worshipful Company of Plaisterers
Just a quick glance at the welcome page, and this is where my eyes went:

1. Crest
2. Name of Organisation
3. Find a Plasterer (nice easy search facility, btw).

Worshipful Company of Spectacle Makers
Mostly a text site. The home page is text-intensive to the nth degree, and could really benefit from text sections being placed on sub-pages, but even so, the pictures are good quality, and for those brave enough to read the entire homepage, the typographical layout is good.

Quote "Noticeboard - the online classifieds section from Art Business Today, the industry's leading publication - has it all."

It certainly does.

Out of date adverts, poor structure, out of sequence notices. God knows what these people do for the Fine art trade if they cant even get their flagship website organized. Think i'll keep my £200+ membership fee in my pocket.

I have been looking at the guilds new site over the last few days and wonder how e-mango justified £50k. I really was looking forward to seeing how the guild would have embraced the web and brought us a truly dynamic site.
I thought the point of the site was to offer impartial advice to potential customers,a trade directory for members but most importantly direct web enquiries to us. A quick google search or a simple entry into yell will help customers find us. This directory search is woefully dated. Its confusing and cumbersome to customers.
In fairness to everyone involved, my own site is at best poor, but it cost me £275. I have been looking into a full e-commerce site, but many designers appear to offering pretty slick looking offerings at maybe £2000 max.
The first thing I now do when looking at sites is see who designed it. How the guild would have been inspired by e-mangos portfolio is almost comical. Try and click their portfolio and you have to open a word doc. !!
I'm sure the team involved with this project all worked hard to deliver this project, but for me while the old version was outdated, at least I could be found by county, post code etc.

Hoops

Link below to the PPFA consumer page, good to look at, info on CPF and MCPF qualifications, some articles to encourage and inspire consumers to get things framed. Simple but effective site with a very easy to use search and advanced search facility.


Find a Picture Framer

I'd love to see content/layout like that on the FATG site.