by Ed Swires-Hennessy, Local Government Data Unit - Wales
Ed
continues his appraisals of different national web sites to stimulate use of the Internet,
share best practice and encourage debate.
My visit this month was to
one of the new members of the European Union – Slovenia – (http://www.stat.si/eng/).
The home page of this site is welcoming but contains too much information: the latest
press releases are not even visible without scrolling! All except 5 words are in a
fixed-size font meaning those with poor vision are not helped. Tool-tips are not employed,
also causing some additional difficulties for the vision impaired. Navigation is mainly
intuitive though the top bar has links in a different colour (and in capital letters):
some headings have the appearance of links but are not. A preliminary WAP service is being
tried (Finland have abandoned their trial).
The themes are reduced to three, with
a general category. Following a theme link, the user is presented with a choice of
sub-themes in a central column together with news items in a separate column: some of the
‘news’ were over 6 months old! Most of the theme pages were also too long with
some interesting ordering. Indicators are at the bottom of the list, and following the
link, one is told there are none. Within a sub-theme the two-column approach is again
followed with even older news being listed. The right hand section shows indicators, if
any, links to methodology and the data. These data links included the Yearbook and the
central database (constructed around PC-Axis). Interestingly, following population only
produced tables on migration and natural change.
The dissemination policy is not
reached through a search but appears on a left-hand navigation list for either of the
first two links ‘National Statistics’ and ‘Statistical Office’.
The publications’ link leads to
an apparently unstructured list. I followed the Yearbook and was given a picture of the
latest cover as well as some text. I thought this was a catalogue entry but then just
spotted a line below the main top navigation that provides a links to the last eight
volumes. The link-line is similar in design to those on the home page that go nowhere!
The
population census is a lonely link – the only one without supporting text. And it was
not working when I tried it. I have tried the Slovenian version and was impressed by the
PC-Axis delivery of tables. Here again, though, the options could be improved by some
addition hierarchical organisation of the available files. Another plus here is the
meta-data delivered with the table titles.
The site
does contain a great deal of data. Some is still in PDF files (e.g. Slovenian in Figures)
where the files’ sizes are 3.3 Mb and 4.4 Mb! Don’t download these on a dial up
line! It is clear more developments are on the way.
This
review was undertaken using Internet Explorer version 6.60 on 1 December at 15.00 hrs GMT
using a 2 Mbit link to the Internet on a Pentium M 1.6 GHz machine.
Please
send and comments and suggestions for sites to review to
Ed.Swires-Hennessy@dataunitwales.gov.uk