Sometimes in politics you can completely miss people. Hopi Sen’s cracking bit of investigation revealing Tory photo-fiddling brought up just such a person, Karen Lumley, Conservative PPC for Redditch. Her website is here. Love the piccy with Davey boy Cameron by the way, at least that one doesn’t look like it’s been fiddled with.

While having a little look around I noticed that the black bar at the bottom where it does the published by bit looked funny. There were some white dots along the bottom of it which for anyone in the business the first thing you think about is whether there’s a load of keywords dropped in with the same background colour to boost search engine optimisation. It’s an old rather dodgy trick and despite most search engines being able to spot it and risking getting de-listed if caught it still goes on although not to the extent that it used to.

The easiest way to spot it is to try and highlight the text with the mouse. In this case, no not any dodgy SEO tricks but simply a copyright notice and a created by so-and-so web designer. Strangely though, apart from thinking the web designer must be a bit crap at, well, web design to allow such a misalignment, the name, CCS Coleshill rang a few bells in the old noggin.

So I decided to have a little look at who they are by dropping by their website which apart from being even crapper than Karen’s site suddenly brought it back to me why I’d remembered the name.

CCS Coleshill AKA Coleshill Campaigning Services which is on their contact section cropped up last year. That would be the ones hooked up with the Midlands Industrial Council that the Electoral Commission were investigating. Nice to know they’re still about and doing admittedly not so good website work for Tory PPC’s. Those in need of a refresher can look here, here, here, and here. Anyone want to tell Karen something?