Media: Opinion - Agency websites: not bad, but nothing to write home about.(usage of web sites)(Column)

One thing that becomes immediately clear when you start writing a column is that you won't get anywhere if you don't make stuff up. Just rely on the news and you'll have nothing to write about.

I'm not suggesting anyone makes up 'facts' or invents agencies or anything like that, but you quickly start manufacturing opinions you don't really hold and start doing things just so you can write about them. Which is how I found myself armed with a copy of Campaign's Top 100 Agencies and a Google search bar, researching agency websites and trying to find some scandalously old-school agency behaviour that I could wave a digital finger at before lecturing about Web 2.0. I have to tell you, gentle reader, I failed. I visited every one, and while very few of them were very good, none were laughably bad, which leaves me slightly columnless.

But we shall plough on, because there's enough bad out there that there's fun to be had. For example, there's a Top Ten UK agency whose website only loads four times out of ten. There's another where the link from the global site to the UK portal just takes you back to where you started, in a pointless circle of despair.

Many of the 100 have sections marked 'news' that would be better labelled 'last time we won something' - most of these were last updated in December, when said agency won 'something of the year'.