Like most industries, the web design industry is affected by fashions and trends. As soon as one website tries something and coincidentally happens to be successful, people instantly presume the design was the key factor and update their websites accordingly.

Google introduced the minimalist website at a time when most websites were cluttered and suddenly everyone wanted to pull in the Digital Feng Shui experts and de-clutter their websites.

Blogs looked like the future once, and big corporate websites not only needed blogs written in a casual way by the Managing Director Press Office, but this expanded to making the whole website look like a blog, and in some cases putting out key financial information in in blog postings rather than in the investors or financial news section.

Now there is a new trend – the analogue clock.

I am not sure where it started, but the first version of it I saw was on the relaunched UK Parliament website, which apart from being full of bugs had suddenly acquired an animated clock at the top of the page. Despite being fairly universally disliked in the comments section, the website designer was adamant that it would remain.

Recently,  the BBC website received one of its periodic evolutions and gained a clock at the top of the page. Semi-tolerable in that it is in the style of the BBC clock from about two-decades ago, so old people will like it, but I still wonder what functionality it adds to the website.

Recently I noted that the Chinese website, Xinhua had gained a clock – although it looks suspiciously like the BBC clock and even had the same animated seconds hand. The file name is different though, so they have at least tried to cover their tracks if plagiarism has occurred.

This morning, my attention was drawn to a website promoting a course about tea tasting (nice idea, ouch price tag) and it has a clock on the top of the website. Are people timing their tea making process by website clocks I wondered?

These are just the websites I could recall this morning – I’ve seen clocks sprouting up all over the place over the past couple of months.

The clocks are taking over!

As quite a fan of both the art and the science of Horology, and at one time had about a dozen different clocks in my living room, I love clocks – but not on websites.

If I want to see clocks, I’ll go here. I don’t need to be reminded of the time every time I visit a website though.

Please, let the fashion for putting analogue clocks on the tops of websites be a short-lived one.

Update:

It’s been drawn to my attention that the beta version of the new BBC website has dropped the clock. It seems the era of website clocks may indeed be a short-lived one. Hurruh!

October 30th – Sunny weather, nice day, sat on the balcony for a while.

October 31st – Bit windy and damp, but went out for a nice walk.

November 1st – Blowing a gale and pouring down with rain. Deciduous trees perform synchronised leaf-drop (3:18pm) carpeting the pavements in brown detritus. First red breasted robin seen in the estate’s communal garden.

How clever of the weather to switch from autumn to winter exactly on the 1st Nov.

This morning I had a bit of an odd email promoting some charity thing from Vodafone. Although I don’t recall signing up for the emails, I am a customer of the company, so just clicked the unsubscribe link to remove myself from the mailing list.

The process itself was painless, no need to enter my details to confirm anything – just a straightforward removal service.

Then the confirmation message:

They will take a month to remove me from their mailing lists?

Well, no, not quite – I am removed from the “master list”, but they may have copied my details into other mailing lists for one-off emails and I might still get those.

Now, as someone who used to be involved in email marketing, and still occasionally dips into the industry, this is an appalling way to conclude my relationship with the company.

Not only have I never ever dealt with a company that locks down a marketing campaign 28 days before it is sent out, even if a company were to do that – they should refresh the list of email addresses a few hours before the email is sent to ensure ex-customers are not accidentally contacted.

Anything else would be spam – plain and simple.

As it happens, most companies I have dealt with struggle to deliver their marketing emails on the day they are sent, let alone a month in advance.

If Vodafone UK is unable to do something as simple as removing an email address from mailing lists, then something dire is wrong with their IT platform.

Disclaimer

The mailing list I run for this very website removes your details from my database instantly if you were to unsubscribe.

When the BBC needs a media friendly scientist, they invariably turn to Professor Brian Cox – a photogenic physicist who fits the modern image of a science programme.

I have been informed by Nature Network that he will be presenting a show this Thursday on the topic of the month, The Moon.

Unfortunately, he has a tendency for devoting much of any TV show he appears in to driving around America and engaging in Rodin style sitting on a rock somewhere while ruminating on how he doesn’t understand things that I would expect a Professor to understand in his sleep.

As a consequence, I would not be entirely surprised if the show is a road trip to Florida, where he is blasted into space and ends up on the lunar surface sitting on his rock and moaning that he can’t understand how he got there.

I think I might go out and listen to a lecture about Werewolves instead.

This is probably more the remit of The Greenwich Phantom, but as part of the Greenwich foot tunnel lies on MY side of the river, and this concerns a particular bugbear of mine, I shall talk about it.

The tunnel, for those who are not familiar with it is a 100 year old tunnel under the river linking Greenwich to the Isle of Dogs, and has lifts/stairs at each end.

I rarely take the lift down on the north side, as that seems a bit lazy, but occasionally I treat myself – and a while ago noticed in passing that a Health and Safety notice in the lift had been amended to state that photography was banned in the tunnel.

Thinking about it, I was sure there was a ban on flash photography, but now it seems to have been recently changed to a complete ban on all photography. Today though, the southern lift on the Greenwich side was actually working for once – although the operator in the lift was on the phone to someone and it seemed it was about to be turned off again.

Inside was a large, newish looking sign warning that photography is banned – but the health & safety sign was still unedited, and my suspicions were proved correct. The original sign only banned flash photography!

For some reason, over the past few months someone has decided that an existing (if dubious) ban on flash photography for health and safety reasons has to be expanded to a complete ban on all photography in the tunnel.

I’ve always been curious about the ban on flash photography as this is just a foot tunnel and hardly likely to cause anything more serious than a bit of annoyance to fellow walkers – and a lot less annoyance than screaming kids – but a total ban on all photography?

I use the tunnel a lot, and people are always taking photos down there without people dying or getting injured. An artist at the local market even sells rather somewhat arty photos of the tunnel.

What dire calamity has befallen the tunnel in the past few months that caused the H&S nazis to immediately clamp down on photography in the tunnel to prevent repeat of this mystery disaster?