This is despite the fact that the BBC had a done-and-dusted deal with F1 to provide live coverage until 2013. And despite the fact that one of the stipulations of the FOTA (Formula One Teams Association) Concorde agreement is that F1 must be on free to air channels to provide the most accessable viewership for fans. And despite assurances from Bernie Ecclestone only a few months ago that it was essential for the sport, for fans and for the sponsors that it remains on free to air:

“They have been trying to buy the TV rights from us for a long time, but we won’t because they are not free-to-air television broadcasters. With their [audience] figures it would be almost impossible for teams to find sponsors. That would be suicidal.” – Bernie Ecclestone, May 2011.

When this was announced on the BBC website the response was overwhelming, with more than 6000 comments posted in the first 24 hours – almost every single one of them saying that they strongly disagree with the decision and feel like TV license payers views aren’t been taken into consideration by the BBC when it comes to making decisions like this. Some Sky subscribers had even cancelled their subscriptions in protest and many were saying they were not going to pay their TV licenses in the future.

We as fans have been given a raw deal. If the BBC can’t afford the cost then they should have just walked away so that maybe ITV or Channel 4 could have bid for it. And whats the point of showing half the races? Thats a bit like saying “I think I’ll watch the first half of the football match and then go water the flowers.” It just won’t work.

Anyway it’s time for the little guys to stand up and be heard. If you have the time then I ask you to please visit saveformula1.com, a site which has been set up especially to campaign for the decision to be reversed. Sign the petition. Grab a copy of the letter and send it to the BBC trust, FOTA, the government’s Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee and F1 sponsors. Alternatively you can visit the BBC website and have a moan directly to them or sign the government e-petition here.

Thankfully there is a light at the end of the tunnel. Microsoft have recently launched a website The Internet Explorer 6 Countdown showing statistics from around the world of useage of this ghastly browser. It’s pretty low in most develped countries and is dropping by the day. We at Expose have decided not to support it any more and will be placing this banner on all the sites we produce – as we would rather educate the few who havent already upgraded and spend out time building a better, more exciting and modern web.

So if you are one of the 2.6% of UK web users viewing this site using Internet Explorer 6 then you will have been greeted with a banner urging you to ditch IE6 and upgrade to a modern browser. Please take my advice and click upgrade – theres absolutely no reason not to these days – its free and you will have a vastly better experience browsing the web.

And if you own a website and would like to join in the campaign then get the code to put on your site. Please help spread the word and save people like me hundreds of hours!

Why did we switch? Well, a couple of reasons:

Features

After eagerly awaiting the release of Joomla 1.6 to be honest we were a bit disappointed. Although it was a total rebuild of Joomla 1.5 a lot of the features that were supposed to be included in the new version didn’t make it into the final release.Wordpress on the other hand comes with the bare minimum of features built in, and then you add plugins as needed to get the additional functionality required. That means no clutter – no useless buttons and geeky Modules and Components menus. Not a problem for web professionals but for our clients it’s not so good.

Useability

The admin user interface of the old version Joomla 1.5 was getting a bit long in the tooth and 1.6 was supposed to be a massive improvement – but when it was released it just didn’t do it for me, especially when compared to the slick backend of WordPress. It still is a bit cluttered and we have found that many customers struggled to find their way around it. And we build websites for a living that we intend on hand over to clients to run themselves – if customer finds it confusing then they either don’t get around to updating their site (thats the whole point of a CMS isn’t it?) or they phone us and get us to do the updates …kind of defeats the whole purpose of having a CMS really!

Extendability

WordPress has grown into more of an application framework than a blogging platform or CMS. You can basically do anything with it, building upon a solid foundation for a sturdy web application, knowing that the fundamentals are all taken care of by a huge community of experts in the Open Source community.

Search Engine Results

What we have found is that without doing anything special WordPress just does great with the search engines… you build a site, put the content in and publish it and in no time I have seen sites performing really well with Google and the like. I don’t think there is any one reason for this, its just that WordPress has all the fundamentals right. You can spend less time worrying about tricks to get your rankings up and more time concentrating on the content. And surely thats what its all about!

I mean don’t get me wrong, Joomla is still a great CMS and definately has its uses but I feel it’s basically it’s been blown away by WordPress. So after spending the last couple of weeks transferring our site across to the WordPress platform, the next task is to redesign the look and feel and add in loads of features that we’ve been wanting to for ages.