Beat It

In "Donation Fail: How Los Angeles Screwed Itself with Michael Jackson’s Donation Website," blogger Rebecca Kelley explains all the logistical and rhetorical mistakes that the City of Los Angeles made in its attempts to use a donation page on its official website to urge members of the public to help defray the public safety costs associated with the singer's memorial service at the Staples Center. Among the many mistakes that the city's webmasters made were the crashed servers from the unexpected web traffic to their government site. Kelley also points out the web design errors that were compounded with their garish and cluttered home page.

Now it appears that the mayor's staffers may have made an even bigger blunder than was initially apparent now the the mayor himself is scolding his underlings for the website and claiming that they acted without his blessing while he was out of town.

(It's also hard to miss the fact that Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa is borrowing many of the signature design elements of President Obama's web presence.)